


The Skittering Chaos

by Thread_Necromancer



Category: Hazbin Hotel (Web Series), Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:48:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 64,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29483964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thread_Necromancer/pseuds/Thread_Necromancer
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	1. Chapter 1

The Skittering Chaos Chapter 1 

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I looked away.

I looked up. My eyes were wet.

So many stars. The universe so vast.

We’re s- so very small, in the end.

The first bullet hit me from behind, where my mask offered no coverage, and I slowly toppled. The second hit me before I could fall, before there could be any pain.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

I wake up. I’m face down on some concrete and the first thing I notice is that I can’t feel my bugs. Mentally, I search for them; but, I feel nothing. As I start to get up, I notice a few things, one being that something light is laying over top of me, I suddenly have an extra pair of arms, and finally that I don't have a stitch of clothing on me. I touch the thing on top of me and realise that I can feel through it, and I can feel my own hand grabbing it as if I were grabbing another body part. I feel tugging at my back at two points as I pull on the strange thing on top of me. I flex muscles I didn’t realise I have and I feel the blanket, or rather wings, move. At a glance they look like moth wings, specifically female silk moth wings. My new wings are large, fuzzy, and white. Gingerly, as I get up, I wrap them around me like a poncho using a combination of my hands and a flexing of my new muscles. At least I'm now somewhat dressed.

I look up and take in my surroundings.

I've woken up on a sidewalk of some not-so-well-off neighbourhood. The buildings all around me are either made of some dark red concrete or red brick. None of the buildings in this part of town reach higher than six stories but all were at least two. The windows of all the first and second floors in the neighbourhood are either smashed or boarded up. None of the street lamps are functioning and only about half of the neon signs above the shop fronts glow. All of the shop names are some sort of reference to hell or something evil. Names like Demonic Groceries, 666 Laundromat, The Villain’s Pub, and Satan’s Pawnshop to name a few. Judging by the names, the large amount of red, the massive glowing pentagram in the sky, and the fact that not even five minutes ago I had just been double tapped, I...

...I'm in Hell.

I give a single note chuckle and smile a little bit. It’s funny how Hell looks a lot like Brockton Bay. Granted, in Brockton there wasn’t nearly as much red or references to Hell and Satan, but when you ignore those, this street could have been any old street in Brockton Bay…

So... now I’m dead. What now? Everything I had done will be my legacy, and everything I had left unfinished, no longer mattered. I curl my legs in and rest my head on my knees. The mission was over, the world is saved. All it had cost me was my chance to be with my friends again, my sanity, and my life. Obviously it didn’t make up for what I had done before in the eyes of God. That, or there isn’t a God and everyone just ends up here.

It would make an unfortunate amount of sense. Wasn’t there supposed to be an apocalypse or something in the Bible? Maybe the apocalypse I had been trying to stop was the prophesied biblical doomsday. I remember there had been a preacher on the corner of one of the intersections in Brockton. He always had a microphone and a speaker, and he was always talking. The preacher would talk about the bible, about God, and how it wasn’t too late to save your soul. He had always been annoying to listen to, especially since I was only in middle school when I had first become properly aware of him. The preacher would interrupt the music I would play when Mom would drive me to school on her way to the university. He had said once when revelations or something comes, all who have not accepted God into their hearts will be left behind by God’s light.

I guess that means that I’ve been left behind.

Did that mean that Mom is in Heaven, or is she down here? We had never really attended church, beyond an Easter ceremony and other events like that. Church and religion had never been a central part of our family, especially to me. There was always something else of concern that mattered more than my immortal soul and where it would end up. I know I have sinned, everyone has, but had Mom sinned enough to be sent to Hell? I've done some terrible things in the past. I don’t regret them, not really. It's understandable though that from the perspective of some all knowing and all powerful deity, my actions weren’t justified, considering that some of them I can't even properly justify myself. Why should I have to slave myself to another being's morality though? I accept my actions, I accept that I deserve Hell, and if given a second chance, I'd probably not change enough to get into Heaven.

Mom though, Mom was a good woman, and a better mother. She had raised me, loved me, and we had been a nice and happy family. While Mom might have associated herself with some radical feminist types, she left the group before it became violent. Mom couldn’t have sinned enough to make it into Hell, unless of course, there was no Heaven at all. Perhaps that's all there is, Hell. Though if there's a Hell then it stood to reason that Heaven should exist, otherwise where did Hell come from? What is one without it’s diametric opposite? Maybe I can ask around? Find out if God and Heaven do indeed exist.

I sigh heavily. Sitting around isn't helping my situation, I should get up from this curb. I probably looked strange just sitting here. Just another minute though, then I'll go. I pull one of my four arms up, and note that I no longer have my white complexion; rather, it's now a light grey. I feel some of my hair fall forward and luckily it's the same dark colour as before. Despite realising how irrational it is, relief fills me as it's still the same. I go to push my hair out of the way and then realise that I don’t have my glasses anymore, yet I can see fine. Apparently ending up in Hell fixes your vision.

My perception of my surroundings has been slowly increasing while I examined myself. I can sense things, through something on my head. Consciously, I move whatever is on my head downward so that I can see them. In front of my face are two massive feathered antennae. They look very much like moth antennae, specifically antennae from the same kind of silkmoths that my wings look like. I move my feathered antennae back up and resume sensing my surroundings. Pedestrians walk down the sidewalks around me and I can sense them through a combination of scent and sound, but it has nothing on my now lost bug senses.

I rise from my seat on the curb and join the flow of foot traffic. I find myself quickly getting lost int he crowd. I use the time to explore my new sensory powers that my antennas provide me with. They're definitely inferior to my bug senses, which is unfortunate, but considering that I was dead now, it was certainly better than just waking up with nothing. When using my bugs, I'd been able to create 3D mental maps of my surroundings just using bugs. That mental map would be a constantly evolving 3D image of the battlefield that I had continuous access to. I could also hear through my bugs and project my voice anywhere within my range.

With my antennae on the other hand, I can hear out of them as well as smell from them. Both of them are much more sensitive than my regular senses and luckily work in conjunction with them. Drawing on my experience with the massive amount of cape powers I had at my disposal at the end of my life, I’m able to make better sense of my new sensory sensations. With my new senses I’m able to almost pinpoint most people within the crowd by using both the sound that they are making as well as their unique scent. There's a sort of fuzziness I can't quite figure out, however. The intensity of the fuzziness increases the closer to a person. It doesn't interfere with my other antennae senses; however, so I can ignore it for now, I can test that particular sense later.

As I practice with my senses, I can perceive something else as well. I sense this sensation more inside me than out, but there's also sort of feeling around me as well. Whatever is around and inside me feels similar to the fuzziness that other people have around them. It isn't dissimilar to some powers I controlled near the end of my life. Some powers came with the sense that there was a well of energy that I could have a cape draw upon to use their power. Not many of them had this going for them however. Most usually found that their power, if it came with a drawback, usually was some kind of cramping of hands, or it would just stop working. I briefly think of tapping into the energy, seeing what would happen, but I shake my head at the thought. There is a time and place for testing out mysterious power sources; a crowded street is not one of those.

So I settle for continuing to walk along with the large, monstrously shaped, crowd. I continue to sense and pick out the various monsters and demons that are walking alongside me. None of them even appear to be human. The size and shapes of all the different monsters and demons varies from as tall as to tower head and shoulders above me, to as tiny as to come up only to my knees. The smells are strange too; some are wholly unpleasant, such as one that smells so strongly of sulphur that I've slowly been navigating away from the source, to the familiar smell of wet dog.

Smelling that I feel my lips tug into a bitter sweet smile. I’m reminded of Bitch and all her dogs. I feel my heart throb as I remember what I had sacrificed so long ago. Rachel, Lisa, Brian, Alec, Aisha. They had all been my teammates and friends, I had loved them, still love them, and I had abandoned them. I didn’t even say goodbye to them when I left, too scared that they would try and convince me to stay and that they would have managed to succeed. Were I able to go back now, just to that moment, when I was deciding to give myself up, I’d have never have gone. There were more important things in life than needless sacrifice. What had I gained from sacrificing them, and consequently sacrificing my happiness? I had gotten a few new acquaintances that I barely spared the time getting to know, a few bits of Tinker tech and some Wards training. All of which I could have gotten without throwing everything away.

In the end, it had never been worth it, had it?

I let my mind wander away from my regrets and just follow the crowd. I start to near a three way intersection when I notice the sound of gunshots and the smell of gunpowder coming fast towards the intersection from the street on my left. I stop walking and turn my head towards the oncoming sounds and smells, then move against the now light crowd towards the corner of a nearby building. Some others in the crowd are starting to perk up as well as I shout out.

“Gun fight incoming! Left street!” Some monsters and demons hear me as a car comes, gunning it towards the intersection. Some demons and monsters are already running for cover, others are just standing in the open like idiots, pulling out phones and starting to make videos of the car chase. Fucking civilians were the same in every damn world apparently.

The two vehicle chase has two demons in the lead car, one firing backwards to the pursuing car, meanwhile the pursuer is firing wildly with a submachine gun. Bullets fly from the vehicles hitting all around the street. Windows in dirty parked cars shatter and I see a bystander get hit with a few bullets. I can feel my face twist into an expression of aggravation at the idiot civilians that didn’t have the proper sense to actually move out of the way. I run out of my cover and grab the nearest idiot, pulling him hopefully out of harm's way. It's one of the demon looking guys.

“Hey the fuck you doing!” the idiotic demon shouts at me as I pull him into cover behind the building corner. The lead vehicle enters into the intersection and tries to turn onto our street but instead skids and flips over, rolling into a store front. My view of the scene is blocked however as the demon guy gets in my face.

“You bitch! You ruined my shot!” He grabs onto my wing poncho before I use my lower right hand to sucker punch him. While I knock the wind out of him I use my two upper limbs to pull his hands off of my wing poncho then throw him to the ground.

“Would you rather I let you get shot?” I ask the gasping demon. The demon glares but takes a moment to regain his breath. While had knocked the demon guy out of the way the two people in the car being chased have pulled themselves out of the ruin that once was their car and were wildly shooting towards their pursuer, who himself had exited his own car. The monster looks like a jacked deer man armed with an oversized Tommy gun. He hides in cover behind his car's engine block and exchanges shots with the people he had been chasing.

“What... the fuck... does it matter?” The demon gasps out at me. The demon watches my face and must see my bafflement. Realisation spreads across his and annoyance soon follows as he face palms.

“Of course… you’re a fucking newbie. You can’t die in Hell, bug brain. So who cares? I’ll heal, and then I’d have sold the vid to the news and made cash money. But you fucking ruined the shot!”  
the demon man seems to have recovered his breath now and was just glaring at me. Slowly as he had been talking I had started to hear more and more gun shots from more than just the original three combatants. I look around the corner and realise that most of the civilians who hadn’t run yet had either joined the fray or are trying to film the gunfight in progress while staying behind any cover available to them. Some of the new combatants are shooting at the original combatants, some are shooting at random people across the street.

This… is getting too hectic for me, especially since I don't have my bug powers, and unless the demon is lying, no one will actually die. Discretion would probably be the better choice over valour at the moment, especially since I don’t exactly know what the rules are around here. I quickly retreat from the ongoing gunfight and duck into an alleyway. I sense the demon getting up from his prone position and pull something from his jacket, another set of shots begin to fire off closer than the previous ones. It seems the demon man had entered the fray.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

The alleyways are a twisting mess of corridors and small little open areas. Fire escapes are rusted to all hell, gang signs and graffiti litter the walls of the back alleys, and gangs of large animals are prowling the deepest parts of them. I can hear through my antennae the chittering and yowling of a fight going on between a mischief of rats and a clowder of cats a few alleys over. In another alley I can hear someone running frantically from a pack of dogs. The fleeing person quickly ducks into a doorway, opens the door, and slams it shut as the dogs reach the door. The dogs let out a howl that even my normal ears can hear. I stop for a moment in the middle of one of the open areas. The place is fairly empty and would be a good enough place to test out this energy I had access to.

As I walk, I concentrate on the pool of energy that I feel inside myself. Mentally, I command it much like I had my swarm. Pushing at it, pulling at it, and just releasing it. The energy seems to generate wind wherever I direct it. I'm only using a small amount so it does little other than push some dust around. I feel I increase the power to possibly make a stronger gust. So far it hasn’t done more than move a can around but just releasing some of the energy inside of me barely seems to drain my pool of energy, if there isn't a limit to it's output, or the speed of which I release energy perhaps I can make a powerful blast of force with it? A sudden strong gust of wind can topple an unprepared person, and if I'm able to sustain it, I could keep someone knocked down as I get closer and dealt with them.

I smell a large amount of different scents coming from down an alleyway, like when I was in the first crowd of pedestrians. I turn down it and see someone at the entrance of the alleyway. The person is some sort of scantily clad butterfly woman who is touching up her makeup in a vanity set up in the alleyway. It looks like something that a high school drama class would have for their acting students to freshen up at, lights surround the mirror while the base is just a set of wooden shelves. The butterfly person looks over briefly before turning back to her make up.

I stop releasing the energy I feel inside of me as I don’t want to disrupt her while she was putting on her makeup. I never bothered with it since before High school but that doesn’t mean I don’t realise that it would probably be hard to put it on while there is wind and dust flying around. As I get closer the butterfly woman seems to finish touching up her makeup, and then I feel the fuzziness around her coalesce into a familiar bit of power. I realise what that fuzzy feeling that others had around them had been. It's very similar to what I feel inside of myself. Unlike when I was just using it to generate wind however, the butterfly person is using it differently.

The butterfly woman’s wings move inwards and she sticks her hands out towards it. I can feel what the woman is doing to her wings with her own power, and can kind of follow along with what’s happening. I watch as she uses her power to start to transform her wings. They quickly morph into a long pink coat that she adjusts a bit as it settles on her form. She ties a belt around her waist and starts walking towards me. As we near each other, she sneers.

“Yeah yeah yeah, don’t get your panties in a twist bitch. My shifts over so don’t flare ya fucking magic at me,” before walking past. I look back but she doesn’t even spare me a glance. Magic? Was that what I was feeling what I'd been feeling this entire time? Magic… it leaves a strange taste in my mouth at first, it’s weird to be seriously considering that my powers might be magic. Though my power actually being magic made a fair amount of sense I guess. Demons are supposed to be mythological creatures versed in magic of all kinds. Mephistopheles from Doctor Faust comes to mind as well as the cultural references to deal making devils. I am in Hell after all; it would make sense that I’m now a demon what with my altered appearance. Considering I could follow along with what she was doing with her power and how similar it felt to my own, it could just be magic.

Approaching the mirror I spare a glance at myself. The person that stares back at me isn’t a complete stranger. My face is generally the same, the same jaw-line, the same expressive lips. My eyes have changed though. They had grown larger than they had been before. They look curious and inquisitive while they take in all the details of my new face. My skin tone has darkened into a light grey, and I obviously have my feathered antennae.

I flex my wings and unfold them from their poncho like form, and then I focus on my energy… my magic. Remembering what the butterfly person did, I start to manipulate the energy as she had. My moth wings start changing somewhat like the butterfly’s had, morphing from a pair of wings into a long coat. Unlike the butterfly’s coat however, mine is more like a very plush white fur coat. I wrap the fur around myself and just feel the coat on my body, enjoying the pleasant sensation as I ran my hand through it. So soft… The coat, other than being extremely comfortable and fluffy, is also much longer than my previous improvised poncho. Where my poncho was barely decent, this coat is a fair bit longer. The poncho had stopped mid thigh on me, where as the fur coat stops just above my knees. I turn street ward and make my way out of the alleyway.

The street I enter onto is in somewhat better shape than the street I woken up on. There are more neon lights and they're all over the place; most of them belong to night clubs or other similar things. There's a large crowd of people coming and going as they walk the streets and cars blaze past at speeds that ruffle my coat. I cross my arms over my coat before I once more join the pedestrians.

My thoughts return to my current situation. The afterlife exists and I am in Hell. Not only that but if I'm in Hell that means that everyone who dies goes to the afterlife, be that Heaven, Hell, or whatever else there might be. Everyone has to die some day. None of my friends have led charmed lives, very much the opposite in fact, same as me, and as far as I know they had never really been religious. So there would be little forgiveness from those who decided where they went, if there was someone deciding at all. So my friends will be dying eventually, and I’ll get to see them when they find their way down here to Hell. Though I hope they don’t end up here too soon. They should have the chance to live full lives up above before they come and join me down here.

I guess that means I should get ready for them somehow. They will need a place to stay as they get themselves back up on their feet. Though how am I going to do that? I don’t exactly have many job prospects, especially since I never even finished high school. While I am smart, up on Earth that didn’t mean much if you didn’t have the paper proving you graduated. Funny how my job prospects only matter after I've already died. I can see about becoming a mercenary, or I can just become a villain once more. I had been very successful as Skitter, and considering that this is Hell, it probably wouldn’t be hard to find a person that could do with a shake up or a robbery. If you can't die in Hell then I wouldn’t even have to care about keeping them alive. I could just shiv them, take the money and be gone before they healed back up. I had done my fair share of silent take downs before during my times in the Wards, this would hardly be any different.

Though would that be a good idea? Hell so far had the feel of Brockton Bay for sure but was that true? For all I know I had just been in the back ends of it, and the place overall was a lot less lawless than it appeared. Not just that but would it even be right? I'd be hurting someone who was probably just as desperate as me. Then they would be desperate and probably do the same as what I had just done. Besides, even if they some how deserved it, like being a mass murdering psychopath or a serial rapist, that doesn't make it right.

I sense a group of three heading straight for me and I move to the side to let them pass, they don’t pass however. They have their full focus on me as three lizard demons slowly surround me. The largest one is to my front and the crowd is quick to scatter as soon as they notice what is going on.

“Heeeeey baby.” The leader of the gang announces himself in a sleazy sounding voice. The large lizard is dressed up in a leather jacket that has a heart stitched to each of the sleeves. The other two lizards that are surrounding me are smaller than their leader. They both have jackets like their leader, though the one on my left has some lipstick and a pink bow on their head as well.

“Hows about we step off the street for a while, you and the three of us. We’ll make you scream all night long.” Do they think that I’m a whore?

“No thank you.” I say outright. The lead lizard however, doesn’t take my refusal with grace. He reaches forward and while I try to move my arms out of the way, they're in an awkward position for moving away and he manages to grab a wrist with ease.

“I don’t think you understand ho. In case you’re blind, this patch here,” the looming lizard points with his other hand at the heart sewn onto his sleeve. “Means that we’re with Valentino, and since we’re with Valentino, and you're one of Valentino’s girls, that means you can’t say no. Kapeesh?” I begin focusing on my magic, ready to release it at a moment's notice. Knowing about gang land territory was essential in Brockton Bay so I already knew what was going to happen now that I had crossed them and their boss. Either I submit like they want, or I’ll have to beat them down. Despite being outnumbered, I'm confident enough with my close quarters training in the Wards and my practical experience in the field as both a villain and a hero to get me through this. I just have to hope that the leader isn't too high in this “Valentino” person’s organization to incur some kind of wrath upon me.

“I’m not with Valentino.” As expected, the lead lizard man’s eyes widen for a second. The leader's eyes quickly narrow however, and the lead lizard starts baring his teeth as his smile morphs from a sneer of superiority to a malicious grin. The gang of lizards surrounding me all let out cruel sounding chuckles.

“You must be a newbie if you’re trying to work in Valentino’s territory without being one of his ho’s. You see bitch, you’re either with Valentino, or you're going to be very soon. Now we’re going to take you to the boss, but first, we’re going to teach you a lesson, a nice long lesson on why you don’t come to other people’s territory and try to muscle in on their business. Mmmkay?” The lizard starts licking his lips in an exaggerated show of his intent. His two companions are giggling in turn; one is even rubbing his hands together in a stereotypical villainous way. I prepare myself to let out my magic power all at once to hopefully blast back the lizard trio, when I notice just behind the lead thug a dirty black van pulls up and a figure gets out.

I can sense something with my antennae as well. Along with the person that got out there is the fuzzy feeling of magical energy at around shoulder height. Round and hollow, almost like a large tube that he is carrying on his shoulder. I hesitate, and stall my attack. I don't know what this new person's carrying, but when he had jumped out of the truck, it had looked a bit like a rocket launcher. I might have to bide my time for a bit if he's their back up.

“Oh I can’t wait to get at dat ass!” The one on the right exclaims in a shrill and squeaky voice. I wince a bit at his unfortunate voice.

“With a mouth that size I bet she’d make a great carpet muncher.” The lizard with the bow growls out in a deep smoker’s voice. These two… have rather unfortunate voices. With the feminine lizard’s comment I’m suddenly struck with how similar a situation this is. I've barely thought of Winslow since… How long had it been? It must have been when Mr. Barnes had accused me of putting Emma in a coma or something ridiculous like that.

“Hey fuck sticks!” I hear from the person who had gotten out of the van. He's somewhere down the sidewalk behind the lead lizard. “Get a load a this!” There's a shunk, and then suddenly the lead lizard’s head explodes in a shower of gore. Wasting no time, I let out all of my magic at once and the two others fly back from me as if they were at ground zero of an explosion. I hear a grunt from the deep voiced lizard woman as she impacts against the wall, while the other flies out onto the street. As the lead lizard's body falls forward onto me I feel some sort of handle press against me from inside his jacket. I zip down the jacket and pull out from it a large bowie knife. Throwing the headless corpse to the side I stalk towards the lizard woman. She'd impacted against the wall hard and is groaning in pain. I don't know how the lizard man in traffic is doing so I have to end this quickly. Luckily, if that demon hadn’t lied, I can just slit her throat rather than have to resort to slicing up her limbs.

I grab onto the lizard woman’s head, push it roughly back into the wall, and then slam the knife straight into the woman’s throat. There is a squelch and my knife stops as soon as it hits bone. I pull at my new knife and it comes out with a bit of resistance as it unsticks itself from the lizard woman. I'd probably gotten a decent bit into the spine. I turn towards the lizard that had been thrown into the street, planning on taking him out too but the van that had dropped off my mysterious ally slams into the lizard, sending him flying a few yards. With my antennae I can hear his wet gurgles as his rib cage has probably collapsed into his lungs from the vehicular assault. I swap focus from the now incapacitated enemy to instead focus on the man who had helped me.

The man at first glance looks like a massive cockroach. His hair is shaped like a cockroach’s shell, and he has two large antennae, slicked back to follow along his hair. He wears a bandanna mask that only covers the top of his face, leaving the rest of it uncovered, displaying a brown skinned and stubble adorned chin. Other than that he simply wears a dirty white muscle shirt and some jeans. The man hefts what looks like some sort of home made rocket launcher on his shoulder, though instead of rockets, it looks like it had some sort of tube filled with baseballs that let gravity drop the balls into the firing chamber. The magic I had felt shrouds the front of the rocket launcher and the handle looks to be more like a lever, probably to push the baseballs into the magical field. The use of magic power, or at least the end result, is fairly familiar looking. The entire front of the lethal baseball launcher glows a soft blue. I file that away as simply a coincidence.

“Wooooo! Holy mother fucking shit, god damn bitch, they bled all over your ho ass. God damn, and that shit with the knife. Fuckin’ brutal! Hahaha! Anyways, come on girl, we need to get out of here before more of them Valentino boys get here, ya dig?” The masked bug man shouts with a wide smile on his face, his adrenaline high likely contributing to his excitement. The door to the van is still open and the bug man runs over and hops in the back.

While I'm walking over to the van I notice that on the side of the van there was some graffiti spray painted in the shape of an M with two horizontal lines striking through it. I stare at it while I make my way to the passenger’s door of the vehicle. I definitely know that symbol. The Merchants, especially after Leviathan, had become a major powerhouse in Brockton Bay for a short period until the SlaughterHouse Nine had shown up in the city. It's becoming increasingly obvious who had saved me at this point.

As I get into the passenger side of the van, any doubt that I might have had, would have been washed away. The driver is extremely familiar looking, and among the three of us, probably looked the most like how she had before she ended up in Hell. She even dressed the same. Squealer, the buxom white trash vehicle tinker that was one of the only reasons the Merchants were even a player in Brockton Bay before Leviathan. Just like in life, she wears a dirty white tank top and tiny jean booty shorts. The only thing different that I can see is that her mouth stays in an ‘O’ even now, she also looked a lot healthier, and wasn’t wearing her Squealer mask.

“Come on woman! Drive!” The man that is likely Skidmark shouts at Squealer.

“I know Skiddy!” Squealer shouts back before her foot comes down hard on the gas. Squealer's mouth moves from it's 'O' as she speaks before returning back to it's more comfortable 'O' position. There’s the squeal of tires as the van tries to get traction and I instinctively grab a hand hold before we shoot off, despite that, I’m nearly thrown from my seat as Squealer drives over the lizard man she had hit before.

“Woooo! Damn that was some good shit. You doing alright moth ho?” I ignore his foul language and derogatory name calling. Instead I focus on why I'm suddenly being saved by the Merchants of all things.

“I’m doing alright all things considered. So why did you help me?” Looking back at him, I see Skidmark’s grin get even larger.

“Well you see, when I first saw ya, ya looked like a ho in trouble, but this is Valentino’s territory so we were about to drive on by. Rules of the place ya know? But then I saw that you ain’t even got shoes on. Who the hell walks around Hell with no god damn shoes on I wondered, then it hit me. You were a newbie! You probably hadn’t even woken up a damn hour before you fucked up. So I was like shit.”

”She don’t want a play by play Skiddy, she wants to know why you saved her.” Squealer helpfully informs her boyfriend.

“Hold your god damn horses Sherrel, I was getting there. Anyways, so what I’m saying is I knew you were new so I wanted to help you out. I scratch your back you scratch mine down the line, ya dig? Plus I was paying back an old dept. See some old timer helped me out when I was new too, helped me find my girl again, so I thought I’d do the same. Ya know, in his memory and all that shit.” I hear Squealer mutter under her breath;

“Fucking angel fucks” but she doesn't elaborate. She probably meant it more for herself than for me. I’d have to ask her what she means about that later.

“I think I understand. So where are we going?”

“We’re heading back to our shop a couple of streets over. We’ll let you hang for a bit and you can decide if you wanna stay or go. I’ll let Sherrel tell you about the rest, I gotta make sure we ain’t being followed.” With that Skidmark pulls his head from the front and starts making his way to the back, peering out of a back window of the van.

“Yeah, like Skiddy said we’re heading back to the chop shop we got. I get some money from repairing vehicles and Skiddy’s got a drug operation in the back.” It seems like dying hadn’t been the end of the Merchants and their drug running operation.

“Starting up the Merchants again?” I ask. Squealer… Sherrel does a double take towards me. I grip onto the handhold even tighter as Sherrel looks away from the road, but Sherrel doesn’t list to the right even a little. Her eyes return to the road before she starts talking.

“Wait, you’re from Brockton? Holy shit haha. That was some crazy shit that happened there, right?” Sherrel’s face is alight with excitement as she realises where I'm from. I had seen it sometimes when I came across people from Brockton, more specifically those I had positively affected in one way or another during my time there. Those I had hurt during my Warlord days weren’t too excited to see me however.

“Yeah, I was kind of in the middle of all that.” I say. Sherrel starts looking contemplative as I say that. She looks over at me once more, looks at my hair and antennae before looking back at the road.

“I thought you looked familiar. You're bug girl ain’tcha? What was your cape name… uh, Skitter?”

“That’s right.”

“I never thought I’d meet another cape from Brockton. Hey Skiddy! This girl was bug girl, you know, from the Undersiders?”

“Wait shit, really!?” Skidmark’s voice comes from the back and he pokes his head upfront again.

“Damn girl I heard you took over Brockton and shit.” Skidmark is still grinning ear to ear. I note that like Squealer he's looking much better, and his teeth are fixed. “Well shit, welcome to Hell, took ya long enough!”


	2. Chapter 2

The Skittering Chaos Chapter 2

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Squealer, or rather Sherrel, is just as mad a driver as she was in life, and unfortunately, so is everyone else. Vehicles are zipping past at insane speeds, with my antennae I can hear car crashes happening and the screeching of tires as Sherrel rounds corners and speeds up down free ways. Three times in the last ten minutes we nearly hit some pedestrians and I don’t even want to think about how many times we nearly got into car crashes. I hold onto the hand hold I have on the van door and I can feel my eyelids trying to open even wider as we continue through traffic.

“So what you think of Hell bug girl?” Skidmark asks from the back. Somehow he can still stand despite all the twists and turns that the van is making.

“It's… hectic.” I say, remembering the chaos that had followed just moments after I had woken up. Hearing with my enhanced senses, I can pick out similar sounds around the city, we would pass an alleyway and there would be gunshot sounds, we drove straight through two active shoot outs just getting away from our little fight, hell I can hear a few explosions going off somewhere in the city. It reminds me of Brockton Bay back when Bakuda was on the loose and the E88 were rampaging because their identities had been leaked.

“Damn right it is. Like this all the time since just a few days ago. Everyone’s on a damn hair trigger, especially with all the newbies around making a fuss and shit. Wannabe heroes going around trying to stop shit and then getting themselves shot. Then they go off to crack the skulls of the guys that shot them and they start fucking each other up, then other fuckers get involved in shit.” Skidmark looks contemplative for a moment. “Lot of fuckers that showed up were heroes and shit. Got some bullshit ideas on how to handle stuff. Bunch a bull if you ask me. All them heroes are a bunch a fucking raiders.”

“If “newbies” are such a problem, then why’d you help me? You said that someone helped you before, but from the sounds of it, these newbies are either different, or are just usually too much of a hassle to help.”

“Nah, shit. Lemme try again. You see, most of the newbies these past few days are fine and shit. It’s just there's a few of the different newbie fuckers, I think most of them used to be capes and shit, learned how to use magic and shit too quickly and stuff. Kinda like you, only you ain’t try to start shit, just sort of happened. Anyways, so the cape newbies start a bunch a shit, stir the pot and stuff, and the little bits of peace that are around in the city, fucking crumble into a massive fucking pile of bullshit as gangs start fucking fighting each other ‘cause one thought the other was starting shit or someone accidentally shot a fuck and all this fucking bullshit.” Skidmark sighs in frustration, and I think I sort of get it.

“I hope none of those fuckers mess with any of the water or electricity.” Sherrel says offhandedly, focusing intently on the road, which I’m glad for.

“I bet you some fucker does, probably try to hold it ransom and or some shit, then Lucy’s kids’ll come out and fuck ‘em.”

“How bad would that be?” Knowing who not to piss off would be a good idea, as well as what to expect just in case I manage to.

“Bad as hell, unlike dear ol’ pappy Lucy and Lilith, they don’t got their own personal power grid and shit. Most of them are like minor royalty and shit so they got a lot, though not all of ‘em got the money, power, or brains to actually get their own power grid for their place and their own water. So if someone fucks with it, then they get pissed and try ta kick whoever’s stupid enough to do that. And depending on the kid, the entire fucking place gets fucking levelled and then people gotta deal with a pissed off demon prince. Not as bad as pissing off an Overlord though.” I'm about to ask who the Overlords were when Sherrel calls out “We’re here,” and I look over to see what she's talking about.

The van slows down and pulls into a driveway in front of a warehouse. There's a white banner over a pair of large double doors that has MERCHANTS spray painted onto it with the M being stylised into the Merchant’s gang symbol. It reminds me of the warehouse that the loft was in back when the Undersiders were still small time crooks rather than city conquering Warlords. I never stayed long in the loft before everything went to crap, but it still felt like a home. Maybe it was because of how welcoming it had been, aside from first meeting Bitch, compared to my house, Dad’s house. While I still slept in the house, it had felt like it was haunted, and only eased on the haunting when Dad had started being able to properly function as a person rather than as just an automaton.

Maybe it would have been better if the Undersiders were just small time crooks, and didn’t have a backer… though then I’d might have just spilled the beans on the Undersiders early, and I’d have never made any friends. I’d just be an outcast as I joined with the Brockton Bay wards and would find out that Sofia was a hero. Considering what I knew of the PRT and Protectorate, they’d probably have not only kept her on as a hero, but we’d be forced to work together despite any of my complaints about her. Add in the situation in Brockton Bay, Director Piggot would have probably tried to get as many of the Undersiders under her belt as possible.

Having not only one of my bullies but also at least some of the Undersiders on the team, constantly ostracizing me, it would have been hell, and would have probably pushed me to ending my hero career, one way or another. Though if Tattletale was there, I’d probably have just ended up being convinced to become a villain. I sigh heavily as we drive into the warehouse’s driveway. My hero career was always doomed wasn’t it. Either leading to living a miserable life as one or being pushed to become a villain, my early hero career never stood a chance. By the warehouse doors, two demons were opening one of the double doors. Sherrel notices my sigh however and she looks over.

“Something on your mind, Buggy?” I look over to Sherrel, a bit incredulous at her attempt at giving me a nickname. It was worse than just being called Bug at the start of my villain career, not that I care too much, but still. It sounds cutesy, or condescending.

“What, no? Fine then, how about Skitty?” I continue to look incredulous at her but she's quickly distracted as Skidmark takes this as his opportunity to join us in the front.

“Someone say my name?”

“Nah I was just trying to think up a nickname for Skitter here, so I thought up Skitty.”

“Ha nice, I like it. So welcome to our lil’ home in Hell, I got to go check on something so I’ll let Sherrel show you around.” With that Skidmark retreats into the back of the van before hopping out of the slow moving vehicle and starts walking into the garage.

As Sherrel drives into the warehouse I note that the demons, one looking like some sort of feminine mouse while the other is some diminutive looking imp demon, were both in their small clothes and both were covered in white powder.

Despite the obvious signs of drug production being plain to see on both of the demons, the only thing I can see are piles of mechanical and vehicle parts all over the garage, the piles of junk leaves only two spots open for vehicles to park at. Skidmark's calling to his gang members as he makes his way over to a door in the garage that likely leads to the rest of the warehouse, and the imp demon follows him. The mouse demon stays behind however and has lit up some sort of joint while I was paying attention to Skidmark. From the smell of it, it's some sort of weed. It smells stronger than the usual stuff as well as has a bit of a tinge of something else in it. As we get out of the van she waves at Sherrel while her bunt is in the other hand. We both get out of the van and I head over to Sherrel’s side of the vehicle.

“Hey boss lady! Who’s ah, who’s your bloody friend.” I look down at myself and realise just how much blood is on me. I had felt it splatter across me when the lizard man's head exploded but I hadn’t checked how much had actually landed on me, too busy taking in the sights and sounds of “Pentagram City” and talking with the two Merchants.

“This little lady here is Skitty, or Skitter. Skitty, this is Mimi.” Sherrel makes to wrap her arm around me but seems to think better of it about half way through, I'm still covered in blood after all. The mouse demon’s eyes went wide as Sherrel mentions my villainous cape name.

“Wait, you mean, Skitter, as in the Warlord of Brockton Bay Skitter, that Skitter?”

“Yup.” The mouse is looking me up and down now as she takes me in. Despite my coat I'm still feeling a bit self conscious about my state of dress and try to pull my coat a bit tighter around myself.

“You know, I know you were creepy, but I didn’t think that under the mask you were that weird kind of creepy that could be cute.” What? “I mean your creepy as shit right now don’t get me wrong, but if we cleaned the blood off, you’d be kind of cute.” When was the last time someone had called me cute? I… can’t even remember. The suggestion that I'm cute catches me off guard, and I don't know what to say.

“I’m not crazy, right boss?” Sherrel takes a good long look at me, probably trying to see past the blood that was covering me, before nodding. Did Sherrel think I was cute now too?

“Yeah, I can see it. She’s got that innocent look with those big eyes going for her.”

“Maybe if we got her into a cute lil’ cocktail dress, she could rock those legs.” I… this is getting uncomfortable. I hadn’t thought of Emma in years, and now the moment I’m in hell I’ve been reminded of her twice now. At least this time it was more light hearted teasing instead of the mean spirited bullying it had been in Winslow. I walk back to my side of the van, leaving the two to talk. Opening the door I grab my bowie knife. The knife's still a bit bloody. I walk back and Sherrel and Mimi are still discussing clothing to fit me into.

“Maybe we could fit her into a cute lil' onesie~”

“Ehem.” I interrupt them before they could go on. I can already feel some of the blood crusting up and clotting on my coat. I’d rather not let that stuff harden on my coat, or rather wings. Blood stains were hard enough to get out of white furs, I don't need it ruining my coat, though, maybe they would wash off easier if they were my wings?

“Do you have a place I could wash off?” Mimi’s eyes are wide and she quiets right down, though I could hear her breathing. It quickened and Mimi takes a step back. Have I done something?

“Oh yeah, sure. There’s a shower inside, I’ll show ya.” Sherrel says before walking towards the warehouse. I make to follow and Mimi calls out as I walk past.

“Nice, ah, nice meeting you Skitty,” Despite how the conversation had reminded me of Winslow, it wasn’t the worst thing. They hadn’t really been trying to bring up memories of Winslow so I wouldn’t hold it against either of them.

“You too,” I call back and hurry to catch up with Sherrel.

The inside of the warehouse is something of an organised mess. Machinery is pushed up against the walls in favour of chemistry stations and potted weed plants with tubes drip feeding some kind of fluid to them. There's a little packaging area, and a few bricks of packaged powder alongside some baggies of leaves. Off in one corner, a spiral staircase leads to the upper floors and…

“Is that a tank?” I ask, disbelief clear in my voice. It's a tiny little thing but it's still clearly some sort of tank, or armoured vehicle. The turret to it is sitting off to the side, having either not been attached or it had been sheared off.

“Oh yeah that thing. Found it here with the rest of the junk. I was going to see about repairing it but the internals were blown to shit, so I was going to see about adding it to the top of the van after I armoured it and made it more stable.” I had seen something like that in videos I had watched of African warlords in active war zones. The ones that had less resources than the others would convert vans, trucks and other things into technicals and use whatever they could salvage from enemies to improve their forces. Considering the appearance of general anarchy on the streets of Pentagram City it makes sense that some of the more enterprising individuals would try to Mad Max their vehicles. Hell, Sherrel when she was alive had already been doing that with her vehicles, coming up with crazy vehicular death machines that the Protectorate, though usually other gangs, had to deal with all the time in cape fights with the Merchants.

“Do you still have your power then?” I ask while Sherrel is admiring the inoperable tank.

“Hmm? Nah, I just remember some of the more basic things, like maintenance on some of my simpler creations, granted I was something of a grease monkey before I got all fucked in the head and shit. I lost all that tinker shit when I died though. You did too right? I didn’t see any bugs flying around and when you blew those guys back.”

“No, I don’t have my bug powers anymore. I just feel this energy inside of me that I can use. I used it to turn my wings into this coat, and I used a lot of it to blast those thugs back.”

“Huh, transformation magic? I haven’t really heard a lot about it.” Sherrel turns towards the stairs and I follow behind her. “All I know is that some older people around here have figured it out. Mostly those who died before all this cape shit started happening. Actually most of us newer people haven’t even figured out magic yet. Like I can’t do shit with it or even feel it really, Skiddy only knows how to make his glowy areas and stuff because it’s, as he says, ‘vaguely the same,’ but other than that most people who weren’t capes or weren’t blasters and such need to be shown how to use it and such.” So it isn't just some universal thing that people can use, or maybe it's because of my advanced senses from my antennae. They seem to be finely attuned to magic since I could actually understand what the butterfly person was doing back in the alleyway. Maybe if this was all magic, I can copy Skidmark’s way of using his powers, or even other’s magical techniques?

We climb up the stairs and enter into the loft of the warehouse. For a second I’m seeing the Undersider’s loft, but as we keep ascending I see more of the room and the false image of the loft disappears. I… Did I really miss the Undersiders that much? Granted, truth be told, despite it being the apocalypse, I think the last time I really could say that I enjoyed myself was while we were trying to fight Zion. Just during the down time, when I could sit with my old team. I think that over the past two years or so, I hadn’t smiled, really smiled and meant it until I got to see my friends again.

Speaking of friends, Alec’s probably here. Somewhere in Hell. I could find him. I smile a real smile now. Despite how he was crass, rude, seemingly uncaring, and did his best to be annoying, he had endeared himself to me. Everyone on the initial Undersiders team had. They were my friends, and I would be able to see one now that I thought I would never get to see again. I’d have to find him. Though Hell is a big place, and I didn’t know where to look. Not only that, but maybe time between death affected where you showed up in Hell, or even if it didn’t, Alec's out there somewhere, probably having established himself, or more likely gotten himself in trouble or even just found a place to crash for a while. If Squealer and Skidmark could find each other, why shouldn’t I try to find Alec?

My thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a baby crying in another room, and Skidmark comes walking through holding onto a small babe. The baby is red skinned and it has two bumps coming out of its forehead right above the eyes.

“Sherrel, his horns are growing again. Would you be able to...” He says as he holds out the baby for Sherrel, who quickly takes him and starts shushing him.

“Shhh shhh shhh, it’s alright, it’s alright Marky. Mommy’s here, mommy’s here. Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon.” The baby doesn't stop however and Sherrel starts making her way into another room. She has her free hand on her shirt’s strap so I could guess how she was planning on calming him down. It takes me a moment to process what I had just seen however. Skidmark and Squealer had had a baby. The implications. We're in Hell, yet these two had managed to either have or find a baby here. Wasn’t there supposed to be some sort of rule that only people who deserved Hell got sent down when they died? Though if only baptised babes got let into Heaven, did that mean that all un-baptised babes went to Hell? Or was Hell the only option.

“He’s a lil’ hellion ain’t he?” Skidmark retorts. “Only ‘bout six months old and shit. We never exactly wanted kids, and we always had enough cash to get Sherrel an abortion back up top, but down here? Shit ain’t work too well. You need some very expensive equipment and you always run the risk of getting seriously hurt.” If you couldn’t die in Hell, that implied that the same could be said of baby’s conceived here.

“Thing is we never would have had the cash to do anything about it, plus I didn’t want to loose Sherrel, not after finding her again. So we had him. Not that I’m complaining. Really kinda put a bit a perspective on life and shit.”

“So you got your act together and made something of yourself?” I ask. Truth be told I had heard a story like this once or twice when I was going over reports back when I was in the Wards. A villain would have a baby and sometimes decided to try to end their villainous ways and join up with the Protectorate. Of the few times that they tried to join up, half the time they got shackled and hauled off to jail, their child disappearing into the government system. Usually the child re-emerged as a cape some years down the line, usually as a villain. Or the villainous parent got accepted into the Protectorate open arms because they had managed to gain some sympathy with one or more members of their local Hero scene. Generally the less the PRT was involved the more often these cases were successful at re branding themselves. Granted that was the same with most capes.

Thinking back, I was rather lucky that Dragon and Defiant had been there at the base. Had it not been for them, after I had killed Alexandria and Tagg, I probably would have been on a one way ticket to the Birdcage, or escaped. Though with Miss Militia there I would have just as likely been gunned down during my escape than live another day. I hadn’t exactly endeared myself to any of the Heroes there.

“Yeah, something like that. Didn’t have any of this shit even a year ago, was still trying to get a hold of enough moolah to get our shit together when we realised she was preggers. Had a god damn panic attack ‘n’ sheit. Then I hit the ground running. I knew how to do a bit of magic and shit so I worked protection, I ran courier jobs, hell I did dry cleaning and shit. Anything to get me some cash, then one day I came across this old ass place. A fucking abandoned tank chop shop or something. I’m sure you seen that fucking thing down there yeah? Fucking crazy what shit people in Hell get up to.”

“What happened to the original owners?”

“Like hell if I know, probably got purged or some shit. Any who, you said you needed to wash off yeah?”

“Yes, I’d rather not let it get too crusty. I’ve had that happen once. Not fun to scrub off.”

“Yeah, crusty shit ain’t never fun to scrape off and shit. Shower’s just through that door, shitter too if ya need it. Don’t take too long though, Lucy’s hot water don’t come cheap!” With that, he walks off towards where Sherrel had disappeared with baby Mark. Following Skidmark’s directions, I head over to the bathroom to wash the blood off myself.

It didn’t take too long to wash off all the gunk that had accumulated on me. When I performed the reverse of my wing transformation, most of the blood got displaced and quickly fell down the drain. The rest of the blood I scrub off before going through my regular shower routine. It was an extremely quick one, much quicker than the one I had when I was still living in Brockton Bay. I had developed it while in prison; we were only given a very short amount of time to shower so we had to make the most of it. Add in my own body consciousness, I generally was one of the first ones out of the shower. I continued the routine while in the Wards as well. The female Wards had this habit of getting into conversations while in the showers together after a patrol, and I had better things to do than make inane chit chat.

There was always more training to do, more information to gather, more ways of thinking on how to stay effective as a fighter even with the latest mandate by PR. Perhaps it would have benefited morale if I had stayed and made conversation, but that was what Tecton was for. He was the team leader that kept everyone together, while I was the tactical leader. I took care of the Ward’s safety while in the field, and he took care of them outside of it. It had worked. Granted I had pushed them hard, but they needed to be pushed hard, and without my training, many more of them probably would have died. Though… I could have been nicer about it, or tried to use more of a carrot and stick approach to training rather than just the stick. I hear someone open the door briefly with my antennae before they shove something inside of the bathroom and close the door.

I sigh, it wasn’t as if I would be seeing them, the Chicago team, again, and I had already apologized to them. I had done my job and they had done theirs, or tried to. I turn off the shower and look at the thing that had been shoved inside. A set of clothes were there; a plain white shirt and panties, some very long mismatched striped socks, and jean booty shorts. I stare unimpressed at what was probably Sherrel’s spare attire. Grumbling a bit I start to put on the clothing.

Funny enough the booty shorts and panties fit fine. The long socks reach nearly all the way up to the booty shorts but stop just a few inches below them. The shirt however, I look down at the oversized shirt which reached just above my knees. It was less of a shirt and more of a dress. At least it was both clean and long enough to cover up the rather skimpy other things the two Merchants had left out for me.

As I exit the bathroom, both of the Merchants and their baby are there in the living room, and both of them look towards the bathroom door as I get out.

“Hey Skitty, sorry about the shirt, we don’t exactly have any other kinds what with spending it all on either Marky here or on the operation downstairs.” Sherrel says while bouncing her little demon baby on her lap as he gurgles happily. I smile a bit at the sight, my annoyance with the skimpy jean shorts abated for the moment, though I would have to get a hold of some different clothing. If there's a clothing store nearby, I can probably pick up some jeans and a hoodie.

“It don’t look like a problem to me. Oh by the way, I’m Adam, since your new, you probably gonna be staying with us a bit while you get on your feet. And if your staying with us you might as well know our names and shiiii~ uh… stuff'' I notice Sherrel firing off a death glare at Skidmark as he began swearing, while Skidmark... Adam’s eyes had widened. She hadn’t minded when he swore in the van, so maybe no swearing around the baby? I’ll have to remember that.

In regards to the names, should I give them it? Cape culture always had an aversion to giving out real names and such, even in the Wards. Half the reason people even knew my name is because it was packaged right alongside our cape names in the Wards. I would have probably been fine with just going by Weaver the entire time there. In fact, most of the time, I did.

They had shared their names with me however. Did they just not care anymore? True, no one could die, but what if I ever found some other way to cause them hell? But then, what could I do? Attack their operation? Expose their names to the public in hopes that some vigilante came around and attacked them? Even if I wanted to, they were already proudly displaying that they used to be the Merchant gang from Brockton Bay, and attacking their stuff didn’t really require a name, just a place. So really, what did it matter if I had their names, or if they had mine? We were all in Hell together. Not just that but they had come and helped me out when I was in a tricky situation. When was the last time someone had come and helped me out in a tricky situation when it wasn’t a part of their job or benefited them in some way? The only people I can think of are the Undersiders.

“Taylor,” I finally say before I over-thought things. We had each other's names now, for how little that mattered. It was like when I had discovered Sofia was Shadow Stalker after Leviathan, only without all the heavy baggage and bullshit that came with that discovery.

“Aw man, I could have nicknamed you Taytay.” Sherrel pouts as she hugs her baby close.

“Ehh… I like Skitty better, It’s like Skiddy, and I think it’s a better Merchant name.” Adam shifts from his laid back position to leaning forwards and towards me. ”Alright, so here’s the deal, we’ll help you for a few days or so, but if ya wanna stay here and… stuff… you got to pitch in and… yeah, you get it.” Pitch in. From the sounds of it I was getting invited to join the Merchants. I almost wanted to say no on principle. Despite my long time away from Brockton Bay, I was still a Brocktonite. While not everyone had heard of the Merchants, many had heard stories of them and what they would do. Some would sell you tainted product, others would sell you stronger stuff than what they said to get you hooked fast, there were even stories of people being held down and forced to be injected with drugs to get them addicted. That last one however was fairly iffy and usually was able to be thoroughly debunked, usually.

Still, working with the Merchants… considering this is Hell, and that they operated with impunity, probably meant that drugs were legal here, or at least, it wasn’t very well enforced. Granted I didn’t expect drugs to be illegal in Hell, Hell being Hell after all. I still had a few days to think it over though. I didn’t have to go in half cocked and unprepared like I had when trying to join the Wards, and admittedly, the Undersiders. I have time to find out what exactly was going on in Hell, some basic information, and even possibly find some alternatives to the Merchants. Maybe even find Alec and see whether it would be better to room with him.

Though if Alec didn’t have much, and I wanted to get ready for when the rest of the Undersiders finally arrived, I would need resources so that I can support them as they orientated themselves, kind of like what the Merchants are doing for me now.

“How long do I have to decide?” I ask. Sherrel was contemplative for a moment while Adam rubbs his stubbly chin.

“Hmm, I’d say about two days after today. After that, if you decide to stay, then you’ll be a part of the Merchants, otherwise, we’ll say our goodbyes and be on our merry ways.” So I had two days to decide. That sounded reasonable, especially considering that they were hosting not only a stranger, but also a villain and apparent warlord. Honestly it was extremely generous when you took the last two things into account.

“That sounds more than fair.” It'll give me plenty of time to grill Adam, Sherrel, or the others about how the Merchants operate, what they're like, as well as the general gist of what's going on around Hell. I might even find Alec. This time I won’t just jump into something without looking first. I’ve learned since then.

“Well alright then, we can find out what you can do to help out around here tomorrow. See if you wanna to join us and be a Merchant.”


	3. Chapter 3

The Skittering Chaos 3

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I look down to my plate of food that the Merchants had served up. Fresh made bacon and eggs. The bacon had just come hot off the stove, it’s juicy and greasy, with the eggs being nice and fluffy. Skidmark has proven to be something of a good breakfast chef with Sherrel apparently handling the other meals. I joined in last night in helping Sherrel with the meal preparation, either by paying attention to little baby Mark when he was getting fussy or just helping Sherrel by passing her ingredients. It was nice.

When was the last time I’d helped out in the kitchen? In fact, when had been the last time that I had freshly made bacon and eggs? The PRT cafeteria didn’t exactly have the best food there; most of it was cheaply bought and haphazardly cooked since most of the budget went to tools to help fight parahuman crime, and the PR budget. Everything else got slashed all the time when it was time for some “budget cuts.”

No one who had even a little bit of disposable income ever ate at the cafeteria for long or by choice. It was always somewhere else. I think I was the only one that was regularly there except for the night personal. I didn’t exactly have access to my own funds during my time on probation in the Wards. My handler had always taken care of it and I was content to let it happen. I wasn’t about to waste my time arguing with my handler and eventually their superiors because I wanted full access to my stipend of the month, I had more important things to do. As usual when I was there, I was spending my time doing what I thought had been important back then, trying to stop the apocalypse. Not that it helped.

Sherrel’s just to my right, having just finished feeding Mark and had started digging into her own food. Skidmark, or rather Adam, finally sits down after he finishes cooking a second batch of bacon just for himself. I grab a strip of bacon from my plate and pop it into my mouth. As I had hoped, it’s tender and juicy, not like the cafeteria bacon, that bacon was small, thin, and best left on a piece of toast with some egg on top. A bite of eggs also proves that they were just as good as they look. Sherrel and I take our time with our food, while Adam inhales his as if he’s starving.

“Well I da-d-darn well say that was the best bacon I ever did make,” I nod along while Sherrel makes an affirmative sound at Adam’s self aggrandisement.

“What exactly will we be doing today?” I ask. If I had a basic idea for what is going on in the day the better questions I can think to ask concerning whichever part of the job I might have concerns about.

“Straight to business huh? You were always the quiet and serious type weren’t ya?” I had been, from the Undersiders to the Wards. Whenever I was in costume I had been the one that was creepily standing there not moving, talking big in negotiations, or I was fighting as hard as I could to end a fight quickly.

“Well since we got some more product and such, I was gonna do a lil run over to the usual customers,” Adam continues.

“Who are the usual customers?”

“Lemme think, some vending machine company, some trying to get off some of the harder drugs around here, that’s what my special weed’s for, some desperate sinners trying to find a reason to keep going, oh and one that wants to spite his boss,” not as large of a customer base as I would have expected, but then it also sounds much more business like considering that they are selling to a vending machine company of all things. Were drugs just something common enough in Hell that you could just buy them in vending machines?

“They sell drugs in vending machines?”

“Oh yeah,” Sherrel answers, “They sell everything in vending machines these days, ever since that Japanese guy showed up in Hell, they started making vending machines that sell everything, not the highest quality, and mostly just small stuff, but they can be pretty good, heck I bought a couple of spare panties a couple of days ago from one, had to wash it but hey, whatever works,” My brows scrunch at hearing that. I hope I’m not wearing one of those pairs, granted it probably didn’t make much of a difference, but something inside of me is revolted at the idea of wearing someone else’s underwear, even if it’s washed well enough.

“Yeah, was our first big break, mostly just wanted ta sell our weed ‘n’ sheeee-ooooot. Though we do sell some “Merchant Nose Powder” to them as well, mostly to send to far off vending machines and such in the outskirts of Pentagram City.”

“It must be nice to have drugs legalised here,” I comment. Adam makes a so-so gesture before continuing.

“Well less legalised and more people don’t really care. Sshhh… stuff’s chaotic enough as it is here, what with our demonic overlords fighting over parts of the city and other parts of Hell. Plus, anyone that even cares to try to get rid of it usually has to spend more manpower trying to stamp it out than they can afford. Nowadays, only people who try are just vigilante groups,” Adam makes a face at that.

“Bunch of low life raiding scum if you ask me. Especially the ones that don’t got territory and still try to uphold Earth laws as if they were still part of the living world. Bas… uh buggers?” Adam looks searchingly at Sherrel who gives a nod. Smiling, Adam continues.

“Got a couple of the buggers in the city, especially after a ton a people started showing up. Bunch of them got annihilated by the local Overlords, or heck, one time the big man himself came and took one group down that was getting real rowdy. Just a big light show and every demon in the area got turned to bones and such. Didn’t even break a building. They’re strung up outside the city I think,” that kind of power… that was scarily reminiscent of Scion’s blasts, only instead of just pure and total destruction, it killed everyone in the area and left everything else intact. Either that showed an immense amount of self control on Satan’s part, or the power he used just wasn’t designed to destroy anything other than demons.

“What did they do?”

“I heard it had something to do with kidnapping one a the newest kiddies of the big man. Charles or something. Wanted to get the big man to help them with cleaning up the city and putting them in power,” Sherrel pipes in and starts giggling at the group’s stupidity, as Adam joins in with the giggles, even Mark seems happy as he starts clapping his hands and giggling in that babyish gurgling way. Meanwhile I just shake my head. There's making trouble around where the Endbringer sleeps, then there is actively disturbing the sleeping Endbringer.

“Well they got one of those things at least,” Sherrel says after she finishes giggling.

“Yup, cleaned up the city a bit. Things been a little calmer since then at least,” curious, who could have thought that plan up? I know the PRT weren’t exactly the smartest when poking at powerful capes, the decision to kidnap Purity’s child had lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage, and likely would have turned to the millions if us Undersiders hadn’t have gotten involved and helped her get her baby back.

“Who was leading the group?” maybe I’ll recognise some names. I swallow despite nothing being in my mouth, I feel something in my throat but I don't know what. In fact I started feeling whatever was in my throat since a little bit after last night’s dinner.

“I don’t know, some big shot PRT man that knew his magic and stuff. I know that he had a few “heroes” join up with him as well. I heard that they forced Heartbreaker to work for them, some deals or whatever that went south for the old bas-bugger, and they had a few of the big man’s kids join up as well.”

“I heard on the news that he nearly became an Overlord or was just as powerful as one. Just needed to stake a claim and take a part of the city, then he would be one of the big shots,” Sherrel adds in as she bounces a gurgling Mark on her lap.

“I would have thought that if they had taken this “Charles,” Satan would have taken a more delicate approach.”

“Pff, they didn’t even get close ta Lucy’s kid, one of Lilly’s broads found out about it and told the boss, big fuc-uh, fricking fire fight or something as she was escaping.”

“I heard she was an Owl demon,” Sherrel remarks.

“Like it matters,” Adam shot back. “I saw a little bit of the crap that was going on on the news, was like an action movie, only people actually reloaded and died when they took cover behind couches and stuff,” Sherrel checks the clock on the wall before getting up with Mark in hand, pulls out a phone and hits a button. A ringing sound comes shortly after.

“We ought to get heading soon here Skiddy if we wanna make it to the rep’s place in time,” Sherrel says as she walks off towards the living room.

“Yeah, alright I’m coming,” Adam turns from Sherrel and looks at me. “So you gonna come along ‘n’ help or you wanna sit around while we head out and make some dough?” while the thought of just taking it easy is somewhat tempting, I need information more than I need time to rest.

“I’ll come along and check things out. I can at least ask some more questions about what’s going on.”

“Alright, sweet. We don’t got much for masks and shit if you need it, but I got some bandannas and stuff that we like to wear on our runs and shit,” it seems now that Mark is out of the room Adam has the green light to start swearing again. Rather than answer him immediately, I decide I might as well show off a bit. Last night I had been practising with my magic, feeling it out with the help of my antennae. Before, I had only really known how to transform my wings into the fluffy coat that I had been wearing, and how to release a blast of magic energy around me. During the night I had managed to figure out how to make other types of clothing through transformation magic.

With my magic, I transform the fluffy pyjamas I had transformed my wings into, into a near replica of the costume I wore during Golden Morning, modified to take into account my extra set of arms. For some reason though, I had something of a short fluffy mantle that covered my upper body and neck, likely just a quirk of my improvised transformation process. Meanwhile I transform my antennae into the mask I had after leaving the Wards. It wasn’t exactly the same, since it was magically transformed antennae rather than the actual mask, but it’s decent enough.

“Well damn, don’t you look snappy, almost like how you were when you were alive and shit,” Adam said as he looks me up and down. “I guess we won’t need the bandanna”

“I guess not.”

“Anyways, let's get down to the van, need to load it up for the delivery.”

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

We load up the van and Sherrel once more takes to the wheel. The sights and sounds of Pentagram city pass by the window as I look out of it. Most of the sounds of the city are distant cracks of gunfire, or booms of explosions. The sights mostly consist of ruined and depressing looking ghettos, places under construction or repair, and finally, areas that look much like the boardwalk in Brockton did, filled with shops, clubs and lights that brighten up the city and make it look like less of a shit hole. That’s likely where the rich and powerful live.

Sometimes the areas are walled off, sometimes they’re not, all however seem to have some sort of private security. The Security in the rich areas generally look like professionals, like the Enforcers back in Brockton Bay, not always however, especially in the less affluent looking wealthy districts, the private security there looked much more like gang members. As before, Sherrel drives like a madwoman. Swerving in and out of traffic, taking turns way too fast and cutting people off as she drives. I swear, when I finally learn how to drive, I will drive better than Sherrel, this is just madness!

We turn down onto one of the wealthy districts. It’s actually quite close to where the Merchants had helped me out when I was fighting those lizard people. The security, I notice as we slow down from highway speed, has the same sort of patch on an armband on their suits as the gang members did who had jumped me.

“Will there be any trouble?” I ask, remembering back to how the lizard folk I had fought had mistaken me for one of their common whores.

“Well, you don’t look like a ho, so I think you're fine. Plus your with us, and them Valentino boys in suits and shit don’t like to start fights like some of the guys further from Valentino’s club, disturbs the shows and shit he’s got going if people start shooting up the place,” that made sense, much like when I used to be in control of a section of the bay, I hadn’t wanted people being harassed unless they were intruders of some kind. Considering that we were here to do business, and the Merchants thought it was okay, then the Valentino enforcers likely didn’t see us as invaders.

The van pulls up to a curb by one of the apartments by a club and Sherrel shoots off a text with her phone. Adam opens his door and looks back.

“You coming Skitty? Give me some back up? I don’t expect nothing, but eh, you never know these days what with all the newbies,” I nod and step out of the van. As we make our way to the apartment building, Sherrel calls out to us.

“Anything happens, send me a text!”

“Will do!” As we walk to the door, I feel I have to ask;

“Skidmark, how did you two get phones? As I understand it, the Merchants aren’t exactly affluent.”

“Afflu-What?”

“Wealthy.”

“Oh this shit? Standard phone contract shit, have it back up on Earth. How don’t you know?” was it common? I had never really dealt with cell phones, either getting them from Lisa. After I joined the Wards, the PRT and Protectorate had provided a cell phone so I never had to deal with it.

“My family never really liked cell phones, and I never really dealt with them.”

“Wait, so you never had a cell phone? How the shit the other of your Undersiders get in contact wit ya?”

“I did get a cell phone, it’s just that Tattletale or someone else always provided it rather than me getting one on my own.”

“Ah so you never had to deal with the phone contracts and shit. Makes sense makes sense I guess. Well tell you what. You sign up with us, and we can take ya to a phone store or some shit, you can go and pick out a phone and me and Squealy can get ya all set up on it. Heck, we can even help you not get fucked by your contract and shit.”

“Oh… thank you.”

“Hey no problem Skitty!” Skidmark reaches out and pulls me into an awkward one armed hug as we enter into the building. I’m not really sure how to react. Not really knowing what to do, I awkwardly, after a moment reach out and return the one armed hug. “You gonna join the Merchant family, you got to have a way to keep in touch and shit. Or heck, waste time and shit if nothing's happening. Helps with Mark too,” as we enter the apartment building, I notice a group of demons just sitting around in a circle on whatever they can use as seats, smoking and drinking while they talk. One however seems to stare right at me. The demon watching us looks vaguely like some sort of humanoid birdman, with a very small beak and grey feathers. Remembering my lessons from Dad in the Bay, I keep my mask from looking at him directly while I watch him. He’s watching us intently, and only shifts a little bit as his head tracks us. Was he an addict? It would make sense if he saw Skidmark everyday coming through with packages like we were.

I feel a knot form in my stomach as we pass. That there was probably another life ruined by drugs. Spending what little he could make on his special brand of narcotics, booze, and cigarettes. I’d have to consider this when I really thought about whether I want to join the Merchants. Despite drugs being highly commercialized, considering the vending machines and such, they are still, in my opinion, a destructive element of society. I had never allowed the peddling of drugs myself in my territory and tried my best to keep them out despite my rather lax enforcement of it, however, I had made it known during my time as a Warlord of Brockton Bay that I would rather drugs not be brought into my territory.

We head up the stairs and arrive at a door, floor six, apartment nine, though the nine has fallen off and only the silhouette of it remains. Not very well cared for then. Another life ruined? Skidmark knocks and we wait a minute before the door swings open. Rather than some sort of bum, I’m met with the rather white and fluffy chest of someone in a white suit. The fluff bulges out in a way that implies breasts of some kind. My eyes travel upwards and I’m left looking at a rather effeminate looking spider demon.

“Skiddy! How the hell ya been!?” the effeminate spider shouts out and gives Skidmark a hug which he quickly returns. “And ya brought a friend! So who’s lil’ miss dominatrix?” dominatrix?

“I’ve been doing good, I’ve been doing good. This here is Skitty, possibly a new Merchant,” the spider demon grins.

“Haha! Nice! I always thought you gaggle of chucklefucks needed someone who actually could look scary. So that her demonic nickname or just one of Squealers cutesy lil nicknames?” demonic nickname?

“What do you mean by a demonic nickname?” I ask. The demonic spider looks surprised for a moment before looking back to Skidmark.

“What you guys ain’t even told her the basics?”

“Hey man I was pretty fucking busy.”

“Oh yeah sure! Busy sucking on those milkers your girl calls tits,” were it not for the mask my blush would have been easy to make out. The Merchants hadn’t exactly been quiet while they went about their night time fun. It might have been quiet enough to begrudgingly sleep through, except for certain parts, had it not been for my enhanced senses. For the entire time that they had been going at it I could hear every small little detail. It was part of the reason I had just stared at my breakfast most of the morning. Until business had entered the conversation, I hadn’t been able to look either of them in the eye that morning, not wanting to think about what had happened last night that caused Sherrel to squeal like she had.

“What are they anyways? F-cup?” the spider demon continues.

“Nah you cracker, since she had Mark she’s a fucking G now.”

“Ha! With how big those udders are getting you’d think she was a cow demon. Any ways come inside, we don’t wanna disturb the neighbours.”

“What you finally got that sound proofing in?”

“Just a couple a days ago. Now not even the lady with the good hearing underneath us can hear when I bring a friend over or two.”

“Would have been useful last night…” I remark under my breath. Not that I was angry about it. While it had been annoying, it had kept me up long enough that I had started to experiment with my magic before I went to bed. Were it not for them keeping me up I’d have never figured out how to transform my wings and antennae into different forms. It was vaguely similar to changer powers in a way, it didn’t exactly correlate with magical transformation, but it gave a good basis for where to start my experimentation, from there, I was able to perceive using my antennae what I was doing, what was going wrong in my experimentation, and correct it with something that worked out better.

By the time I finished experimenting and found out how to transform my wings into something similar to my last costume, the two Merchants had finally finished their “Nightly business,” and had dozed off to sleep. From there, it was a simple matter of transforming my wings into a nice and cozy set of fluffy pyjamas and an old timely night cap so I wouldn’t hear their snoring all night, and I dozed off for a good few hours. As I look up from my musing, I notice that my remark hadn’t exactly gone unnoticed.

“Hahahaha, you beast! You trying for another kid or something,” the spider demon exclaims.

“Hey my mama had six kids before she turned out any bad eggs so I think we ought to be able to do the same.”

“What were you? The seventh?” the spider demon jokes.

“Eighth actually,” the spider demon continues to chuckle at Skidmark’s joke. I decide to enter into the conversation however. I came on this trip to gather information to make an informed decision after all.

“Excuse me, Mr~?” Skidmark notices how I trail off and his eyes go wide and his face morphs into something akin to surprise.

“Oh shit, sorry I forgot to introduce the customer here.”

“Pfft, some salesman you are.”

“This here is Angel Dust. Cracker’s been dead longer than the both of us combined.”

“You know it nigger,” Angel Dust said as he made finger guns and pretends to fire at us.

“Angel Dust, like the drug?” I ask. It sounds almost like a cape name. Was a demonic nickname just some sort of cape name? or something to help reinvent yourself?

“Damn straight, that’s shit was my jam when I was alive, and still is. Hey Skiddy, you got my package right?”

“That’s right, got it right here, you got my money?”

“You know I’m good for it ya Cockroach. It’s the same place as always,” Angel Dust says. He put a fair amount of emphasis on the ‘cock’ in cockroach.

“Yeah yeah, I’ll go get it. Here!” Skidmark says as he tosses Angel Dust a small baggie of “Merchant Powder” before walking off towards one of Angel’s rooms. Angel on the other hand walks over to a couch and falls into it, lounging and gesturing towards a seat opposite of it.

“Come on take a seat,” graciously I accept. Unlike Angel Dust however, I don’t immediately start lounging as he had. Angel Dust as he waits for me to sit down opens the baggie a bit before taking a little sniff of powder.

“Oooo yeah, that’s the good stuff. Any who, you must be pretty new to not even have a nickname yet right?”

“That’s right, I died some time yesterday and woke up in the street,” Angel Dust winces at that.

“Oof, sorry… didn’t mean to bring up any bad memories. You doin’ alright?” Angel looks concerned as he asks me how I’m doing. Funny how despite all the propaganda and lies that get spread around by the PRT about villains, drug addicts and dealers, along with so many other people that we are supposed to look at with fear and disgust, turn out to be fairly decent people half the time. The same could be said of the various heroes I've met during my time both as a villain and a hero. Half the time they are decent people, or they grow to be decent people. Other times, they are just rotten, or don't deserve what they have. I can think of various heroes I've met during the various meet and greets that look down on me for being a former villain and gang leader, yet just as many of them will pat me on the back and congratulate me for joining the forces of good.

I never tell them about my doubts, how at night, when I was laying in bed, sometimes I would wonder if it was worth it, if throwing everything away was actually accomplishing anything. In the end, I would banish those thoughts from my head. There wasn't a point in pondering on them before the fact. If we succeeded would be the ultimate test in whether this was all worth it. If we managed to save the world, having to deal with everything here was worth it, otherwise... and that was were I would leave it, because there was no time for doubts, not when I had to fit in training, studying, and patrolling into my day to day.

“I… think I am, I wasn’t exactly in the best place when I died. I’m not exactly sure if it was mercy, but… I didn’t exactly try to stop her…” I don’t explain further. I still haven’t fully thought through my own death.

“Hey no problem, Hows about we switch the subject to something less gloomy. Like ya nickname!” ah yes, the demonic nickname we had been talking about before.

“Do I need a demonic nickname?”

“Eh, not really. Getting a nickname ain’t for everyone, but it gives ya an opportunity to reinvent yaself. Plus it’s good for keepin’ any enemies ya mighta had off ya back. Myself, eh, I just chose what makes me happy.”

“Makes you happy?”

“Yeah, made me happy, you know, made things not so bad. Like everything was shit and stuff and nothings going right, and to ease off some stress you take a hit of the powder. You're lying there, and you kinda realise, things just ain’t that bad anymore. Like, what happened, all that shit before, it wasn’t so bad. Kinda made it easier to deal with life when you were taking the stuff. Then it would end and you needed more. It’s shit but it was a way to cope with a shitty situation, ya dig?” I do “dig.” Drugs had been a big part of growing up in Brockton, even more when going to school at Winslow. I’d heard how for some of the people there, it made life bearable. It lined up with how Angel described it. I wonder if he was like some of those kids that tried drugs and got hooked. Tried them out, and realised they weren’t all that bad as people said, they even made him feel great when he took them. I wonder when he died, or how things were in life for him? Maybe the drugs were the only thing he could look forward to in the day?

I’m glad for a moment of the incident on the bus now, where a drug addict went ballistic on the bus and started freaking out. It did more to scare me straight than any of the various DARE programs and hero guest visitors that went around to schools to talk about the evils of drugs. Drugs had a way of making you feel good in some way. I had always thought it was just like a hit of dopamine, or those tingles that I would get back when Mom would give me head massages. With the incident on the bus with the drug addict my younger self wouldn’t have gone and tried anything, not that I had any friends back then that would have tried to pressure me. Perhaps if it hadn’t been for that event, then I could see myself falling head first into them.

There had been some days where the only thing I wanted was for the pain of the day to go away. Had an enterprising Merchant kid gone and approached a younger me… I had latched onto Julia when she had pretended to make friends with me. She had become my new best friend, a lighthouse on a stormy night, then she took it away from me. What if it had been a Merchant? Would I have ended up like Angel Dust here, or the addicts downstairs, or even those people that Skidmark had said were just trying to get through the day to day? Probably. I had dived head first into villainy and stayed with it because of the friends I made. Hell, at the end I had been planning on going back anyways. Maybe in some ways, I am an addict.

“You thinkin’ of a name or what?” Angel Dust thankfully interrupts my thoughts, pulling me away from my dark musings. Right, a nickname. Angel Dust had said that he chose his nickname because it was something that made him feel good. Maybe I should start there. When had I felt happy, truly happy? It definitely wasn’t when I was with the Wards. That had been because I had thought I had to, not because I enjoyed it, and it still ended with Golden Morning and all that shit happening. So taking the name Weaver for my nickname was out. Perhaps I could just be Taylor? I had thought about just being Taylor near the end there. Not wanting to hide behind a mask, not being Skitter the villainous warlord, not being Weaver the brutal hero, just Taylor. Just being me.

Though who was I really? I hadn’t really been Taylor for years despite that being my name and people calling me that out of costume. Who was Taylor? Was Taylor the chatterbox youth? No, not any more. That Taylor died a long time ago, murdered by her best friend who plunged a knife into her back. Taylor’s best friend and sister left her to die, bleeding out in the halls of Winslow, to be consumed by a new Taylor.

Was I Taylor, the loner, the loser, and the person who naively believed in the cultural propaganda that all villains were evil and all heroes were the epitome of good? That all masters were villains in the making that could do no right without the guiding hand of the Protectorate? Was I the secret master cape who cowered from the thought of being found out? No… she had died as well. Not a violent death like the younger Taylor had, no, she died as her world was shattered into a million pieces. When the heroes were the villains of her story, and the villains, became her greatest friends and allies.

Was I Skitter? The villain and warlord of Brockton Bay, the one who was spurned by the heroes, who sacrificed much on the path to Hell just to save a little girl who betrayed her in the end. The one that conquered territory and used that territory to improve the lives of those who fled into her hive for safety? Was I Skitter? Some might argue that Skitter had died when she tried to give herself up to save the world, but had I truly been Weaver? At the end, Contessa, I think she called me Khepri. They had called me that at the end apparently. Khepri.

Who was I then?

Every identity along this road has been a part of me, even if they died along the way. All were masks, roles I had played. Some had been shattered, others, put away. I had the choice now. Who was I? Who was I really? All of them were Taylor, some more than others, but who was I, or rather, who should I be? What mask would be most useful to try and help my friends… My friends…

My friends had been the ones to mold me. To shape me. Every person is defined by their experiences and their interactions with the people and situations around them. Right now I’m a probationary Merchant, but that might not always be the case, especially as my friends were coming here eventually.

When had I been the happiest in my short life on Earth? I was my happiest when I was a chatterbox, when mom was still alive, when I was innocent. That Taylor as I acknowledged before, however, was dead. So then when was the next time I was my happiest?

It was when I was surrounded by my friends, by my team. When I was with Lisa, Brian, Alec, Rachel, and Aisha. Those days, those days had been the happiest in my life since the day that my younger self had died.

“Skitter” I say in a soft voice. “My name… is Skitter.”


	4. Chapter 4

The Skittering Chaos 4

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“Jesus, finally, I thought you had an aneurysm or something,” Angel Dust says almost immediately. The more and more Angel Dust talks the more he reminds me of Alec.

“I’m sorry that I wanted to give something that sounded this important some proper consideration,” I deadpan and Angel Dust shrugs at that.

“Eh, probably a good idea, at least you’re name’s better than some schmucks around here that go with something stupid,” at least here you couldn’t have your nickname assigned to you like your cape name could be. When I had originally gotten the Skitter name I didn’t particularly care for it. It wasn’t the best but it also wasn’t the worst. It had just sounded like I was low and pathetic, something that skittered around and was barely even worth noticing as most skittering things were. Over the years however, I had started to grow more attached to the name, despite going by Weaver at that time. Not that I would have ever admitted it. I had been trying to convince both the PRT, Protectorate, and myself that I was a fully committed hero that didn’t need to be watched any harder than I already was.

“So why Skitter?” Angel Dust asks, by this time, Skidmark has come back, counting a wad of cash, most of them appear to be either one dollar or five dollar notes.

“It was my villain name, and the name I was using when I was at my happiest.”

“Villain name huh? So you were one of those super powered guys from Earth, what was your power?”

“Bug control, though at the end of my life I had my powers altered and I could control people, at the cost of my sanity.”

“Ooof, sounds rough. Yeah I gotta gal pal named Cherri Bomb, girl was a pretty decent villain. She’s even got some territory in the city. She came to every one of my shows and after a few fucks, we kinda became friends.”

“Ya damn spider cracker, I thought you was gay.”

“I am gay nigga, but if it’s with the right people its fine, or a three some. Also kinda helped that she was using a strap-on,” I tilt my head slightly. What’s a strap-on?

“So anyways, you got bugs all over the place then huh? Learned how to use some bug magic or something?” thankfully the subject is back to something I’m familiar with.

”No, I haven’t quite figured how to do anything with bugs yet.”

“Nah but she knows a bit of magic, first time I saw her she blew away a bunch of mother fuckers with some magic blast shit, and she also magic upped them clothes she’s wearing.”

“Wait really? Ha! So you're telling me if I do this,” Angel Dust grabs a hold of the collar of his suit jacket and slowly pulls it off just enough that the shoulders of the shirt he had underneath was showing. Then he starts leaning against the table before a leg slides onto it. The Jacket continues to fall slightly as he comes up close, reaches a hand out, scratches under my chin, and whispers.

“Hey baby, you wanna know how loud a professional whore can make you scream?” he sits there a moment on the table, his eyes darting down, but seems disappointed about something. Was he trying to… disappear my clothes? How very… Alec of him…

“I don’t have to concentrate to keep my clothes transformed. Even if I did, I have clothes on underneath my costume.”

“Aww. It’d be funny though,” he drops the sultry act immediately and retreats back to his couch. Skidmark finally seems satisfied with the money that he got and takes a chair at the end of the table. Alec and Aisha would have loved Angel Dust. Probably would have even brought him into the Undersiders if he was a cape, or just recruited him into their ranks if he wasn’t. Aisha's still alive as far as I know, but Alec, it was a long shot but…

“Angel Dust.”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” the spider demon interrupts. Ignoring the interruption, I continue.

“You wouldn’t happen to keep track of the capes that end up down here do you?”

“Hmm? Nah, not really, I’ve always been a more of a look out for yourself kind of guy, ya know?” oh I realise, I had just hoped that this particular part was where he and Alec differed, though maybe I could ask Mimi, she seems to be rather into popular cape culture, or just had a fascination with me enough to know about me, maybe she would know?

“Trying to find your team mates?” Skidmark asks and I merely nod.

“Damn, hope you find them, took me like sixty years to find my brother and sister, and that was with all of us searching, or well, two of us searching, brother’s a dick and didn’t give a shit,” Angel comments.

“Yeah, it was a damn miracle when I found Squealer again. Doing what she always did in the Merchants and was working on cars and shit. She ain’t no tinker no more, but damn can she make an engine purr,” Skidmark chuckles and a wide grin spreads across his face, ”I would love to give her a Mustang or some shit to fix up, she’d grab my by the collar and fuck me till my fucking hips broke, after she fixed it up that is. Course, probably still blow me right there in appreciation.”

“Ha, I swear your girl loves cars more than any man I’ve ever heard of, you’d think she was a tranny.”

“Hahaha, you’d fucking think, but nah, she is one hundred and fucking ten percent all woman. And I mean come on; you think she’d have ass and tits like that if she was a bro?”

“I don’t know there buster, surgeons down here are pretty good, while I got lucky with these baby’s,” Angel crossed his arms under the fluff and made them bounce a bit, emphasising his point, “most of the whores around here got at least a bit of a boob job, or do some magic hocus pocus to make them bigger,” Angel’s eyes got wider as he realised something and then turns to me.

“Hey since you are already altering your body parts, you think you’d be able to give yourself a boob job? While you got the ass and legs, you need the tits to match ‘em sister,” I’m glad for my mask because all I can do is just stare at Angel incredulously. Granted, when I was younger I had something of breast envy and would likely have tried to do just as Angel Dust said, but I was quite fine with how my breasts were now thank you very much. The puberty fairy had decided that I was going to have small breasts, smaller than my mothers, and I was alright with that. Besides, if I had actually started developing larger breasts, it would have led to back problems and affected my fighting which I very much didn’t need, especially then.

“No thank you, I’m quite comfortable with my bust size at the moment.”

“Hey your loss tiny tits,” I gracefully ignore the dig at the size of my bosom. Hoping to bring this conversion back to a subject I find more interesting, I interject.

“We were talking about magic before, yes?”

“Oh yeah sure, uh, well I ain’t the greatest with the stuff, I know a few tricks and such… Say you said you were a bug villain or something before right?”

“That’s right.”

“So what could you turn your body parts into clothes too?”

“No, I was exclusively a bug controller.”

“So where’d ya learn to turn your body parts into clothing? Steal some guy's magic book or something?”

“No, and they have those things around here?” Angel Dust shrugs his shoulders.

“Eh, yeah, kinda, though they’re mostly controlled by the nobility and shit. They’re mostly kept off the internet by a demon Overlord called Velvet, though you can find some stuff if you look deep enough. It’ll get ya banned off social media though if your sharing magic shit, and then the TV stations’ll smear ya for anything they can get their hand on.”

“Does this Velvet control both the TV stations and most of the internet?”

“Nah Velvet doesn’t control the TV, that’d be Vox, a buddy of hers. They’re part of something that some people are calling the Demonic Triumvirate. New fucking name, no idea where it comes from,” it sounds like some of cape culture has managed to influence things here in Hell enough that people were copying some things from Earth. That will probably increase now with the large amounts of people that have probably ended up here during Scion went on his rampage.

“Yeah I work for the other one in the Triumvirate. Valentino, he controls most of the porn, sex, and anything related to lust here in Pentagram city,” I consider telling Angel Dust about my run in with some of Valentino’s thugs, but I brush it off quickly. No need to bring up something like that, especially with someone I just met who works for the person who’s gang I had to defend myself from.

“You said that there is a sort of nobility in hell. What would it take to get access to their libraries?”

“Oh you know just a couple deals and the possibility of eternal servitude, the usual stuff when it comes to self important assholes around here,” Angel Dust makes a dismissive wave of his hands as he says “assholes.”

“They got a lot of fucking money and shit, wouldn’t mind having a crack at one of their vaults and shit… hey Skitty, you guys did pretty good at that bank in Brockton, you think when you guys all get back together we could plan a heist or some shit?” getting access to that kind of knowledge... I believe Sir Francis Bacon was the one that coined the term; “knowledge is power” back during the renaissance. Not that I had an easy way of checking. In any case, I had always tried to practice that sentiment when I was a cape, researching into the scene as much as I could when I was planning on breaking into it. I had gone over information regarding possible people who would oppose us taking over Brockton with Lisa.

I continued this practice in the Wards by meticulously going over the different profiles of the SlaughterHouse Nine and generally any cape profiles and cape fights I could get a hold of when I was doing my information gathering sessions. I overheard some people talk about how they had updated my threat rating to a Thinker 3 along with my Master 10. I could kind of see it considering the amount of research I did. Though that they added a 2 of everything else? That was just a bit overkill in my opinion. Then again, I did carry a gun with me so Blaster 2 kind of made sense. But still, Tinker 2? What exactly had I Tinkered?

“We would require internal plans of the place first of all. The bank job was something that was planned weeks if not months in advance, and I was only brought onto the team maybe a couple of days before we went off and did the job.”

“But you could do it if you really wanted to?” I could practically see the dollar signs in Skidmark’s eyes.

“Perhaps if Tattletale managed to keep her power maybe, but considering how everyone has been disconnected from their powers here I’m not so sure we would have access to that.”

“You sure? I always kinda saw you as the leader, no offence to that Grue guy, but after a while you kinda stood out, like Grue and Tattle were the faces, and you were the brains behind it all and shit.”

“Not exactly, while I'm good at combat, Tattletale was the one who was gathering the information and processed it. We had a backer who was the leader of it all. Do you remember Coil.”

“What that small fry? Sure he was polite and shit, but he didn’t have all that much power.”

“He had much more than he let on. He was the one in charge of the Undersiders, the Travelers, not to mention that he had Uber, Leet, and Circus on his payroll. He also had a secret underground lair where he had a powerful pre-cog under his control. Plus his civilian ID, one Thomas Calvert, became the PRT director for a short period of time, before I killed him.”

“Wait, shit, he had all that? Muther fucker, good thing we never went after his ass or we would of been up to our eyeballs in shitheads.”

“He also had a couple of spies in your organisation; Trainwreck was one of his, as well as in every other organisation. He was also the one who leaked out the Empire’s personal information,” Skidmark’s mouth morphs into a scowl when I mention that Trainwreck had been a spy.

“Muther fucker! That fuck! If I ever find that Tinker piece of shit I will fucking rip his god damn ass a new one!”

“Mind if I watch?” Angel Dust interjects and Skidmark turns on him.

“Shut up ya Ho, not in that way!” Skidmark continues muttering a stream of “Muther fucker” and other insults aimed at both his traitorous subordinate as well as Coil. I hear something about Purity, then something about a drug house. It seems Purity’s rampage might have damaged the Merchants quite a bit with her random acts of destruction.

“Boy you sure got him riled up,” Angel remarks with a toothy grin.

“We are recently deceased. It makes sense that some of us still harbour feelings for our life before.”

“Hey I ain’t sayin’ nothing about that. You guys do you,” Angel says with a shrug.

“So anyways, you wanna learn magic so much, why don’t you think about all the different things about yourself? You got Antennae that can shape shift, you got a bunch of arms,” as if to put emphasis on the multiple arms part, Angel suddenly lifts his own up and two more pairs appear underneath them, all doing jazz hands. “And I can make webs and stuff. So, anything new that you’ve noticed recently,” unconsciously, I rub at my neck. That phantom lump in my throat was something new. I tried ignoring it to the best of my ability, but maybe it was something more?

Silkworms were known to make silk from glands near their mouth, and I was rather fluffy like them. I could also see about doing as Angel Dust did and manipulate the number of limbs I had, that could actually be fairly useful, make people think that I only have a certain number of limbs, then come out with more. Using a bit of magic, I unfold my antennae from their mask transformation. Angel Dust looks a bit surprised at that, he really shouldn’t, I had already told him that my mask was a magically transformed part of my body.

“Would you be able to do that again? I would like to see if I can replicate that,” I start paying attention with my antennae to the magic within and around Angel Dust. Once more Angel shrugs.

“Yeah, sure thing, Doll face,” then Angel Dust proceeds to go back to only having a pair of arms rather than three pairs. He does this a few times, changing up the number of pairs he is releasing. I think I can follow what he is doing. It’s actually fairly close to how I had been transforming my wings and antennae into clothing. Experimentally, I retract my lower pair of arms, and find myself in possession of only two arms. Since I didn’t alter them, but rather retracted them, I can feel them, kind of. It’s more of a phantom sensation than anything concrete. It takes almost no magic at all, and it’s almost imperceptible unless I’m really focusing on how much magic it actually takes to change them. I do it a few times before settling back to only having two arms, then transform my wings/costume to match only having two arms.

“So what, your antennae can see magic? ‘Cause you picked that up crazy quick,” Angel asks while watching me as well.

“Something like that. If it weren’t for my antennae, I wouldn’t be able to walk in here with this costume.”

“Oh yeah? What would’ve ya been wearing then?”

“An oversized shirt and some shorts.”

“Well at least you got clothes, I knew a few guys that didn’t even have clothes before they got purged.”

“I nearly was one of those poor fucks,” Skidmark comments having calmed down while we talked.

“Luckily I died a while before the purge so I got time to cosy up to my first pimp,” that has to be the third time that this 'purge' was mentioned since I’ve ended up here in Hell. At first I didn’t think anything of it, but it keeps coming up.

“What is this ‘purge’?” both of them look at me like I had grown a second head before Angel turns to Skidmark.

“Jesus, you really haven’t been telling her much have ya,” Angel comments.

“It never came up and I was busy with shit.”

“We all know what you were busy with,” unfortunately for my attempt at getting a full eight hours of sleep, yes we all did.

“Yeah and it was a damn good time too,” rather than let this go on again, I clear my throat before they could continue their banter. This 'Purge' sounds rather important and I didn’t want to get side tracked like how our talks about magic kept getting side tracked.

“Oh yeah the purge. Well basically every year some angel fucks from heaven show up and start fucking erasing everyone they can get their hands on. Looks like they’ll be busy this year though. So many poor fucks are out on the street that they might not even get a quarter clear before their time is up.”

“But I thought people couldn’t die in Hell.”

“You’d think so sister, but no, see the angels got these weapons that erase a demon from existence. There’s even something of a black market for them around Pentagram city,” Angel interjects, and then looks thoughtful “I know my boss has got like a vault full of them. Enough that he regularly lends out a few to people to assassinate people he really wants just gone from existence,” so even in Hell you can die. That's… disheartening. Why did these Angels do this? Weren’t people already in Hell? Why do they need to give them a final death? Especially those who were out on the streets? Could they have gotten people I knew? Had they gotten Alec?

“Why do they do this?” I ask and Angel just shrugs.

“Something to do with overpopulation, I don’t know,” this is starting to sound like Hell has a problem as bad if not worse than Earth Bet’s problem with Endbringers. Only it was with the supposed angels of God rather than some toys of a depressed eldritch Entity under the subconscious control of a mass murdering egomaniac.

“What’s a purge like?” instead of Angel answering, Skidmark does.

“It starts out with the toll of a bell. Then the next thing you know, the sky splits open and angels start descending from heaven into hell. They’re tall, almost mechanical like things. More like Terminators with wings and fucked up faces and shit than winged humans. They go through the streets fucking up everything that they come across. It’s meticulous. First they try to kill everything on the streets. It’s a slaughter at first, then slowly the survivors get whittled away until there are none left on the streets. Usually there are enough survivors on the streets that by the time the bell tolls, the angels don’t start breaking down doors… but from what I’ve heard, a few years, when angels start breaking down doors are the worst years. See property here in Hell is kinda a big thing. Since the angels are so systematic in the purge, if you got a house, then you’re probably safe if you keep quiet. But if all or most of the survivors out on the street get purged… well then they start knocking and searching for a new target. They go door to door, breaking shit and searching. You get cornered like that? You’re fucked,” Skidmark shuddered. “Sometimes… you can still hear their screams…”

“Hey weren’t you one of the street survivors one of those years?” Angel asks. Skidmark had a far away look on his face as if he was seeing something else. I can see his eyes were getting watery as he keeps blinking faster than before, his fist clench, and a scowl appears on his face.

“Yeah… first year… I had just met back up with Squealer… Me, Squealer, and Harry, that was the old guy I was talking about before there Skitty, the guy who helped me find Squealer. We were celebrating around a drum fire. Saved up some money for some of the good shit, something some nerds called Daedric Lava Whiskey. Was some pretty good shit, when we heard the bell toll. We didn’t know what it meant so me and Squeals kept drinking, but Harry. He got this look on his face. Then he threw his shit away and grabbed the guns we had gotten. I was still figuring out magic and shit so I had only just done it to my pistol. Now Harry, he was the most lucky go guy you could ever meet. Nothing got him down and nothing ever scared him. But the moment that bell tolled, and the sky split? He looked terrified. We ran into an alleyway. You ever been in the alleys Skitty?” I remember my short jaunt through them. With the senses granted by my antennae, I had been able to avoid any trouble in the alleyway I had been walking down. Though there had been a lot. Demon dogs, cats, rats, and that was all I could hear. There were smells there too. Some smelt sweet and inviting, but I could also smell the iron like tang of blood there too so I had avoided those paths.

“I’ve been down them once.”

“So you know you only go down them deep, like we did, if you’re truly desperate, or stupid.”

“Or ya got a lot of firepower,” Angel adds in.

“Yeah, either way, we start booking it, it was in one of those intersections that I saw my first angel. We came running into the place and suddenly saw it there just as it cut down some poor fucker. Sliced his throat then as he was gagging on his own blood, she shoved a spear right through him. We watched as the spear came out of his still screaming mouth, blood spilling out as his eyes rolled up and he collapsed to the ground. Something sort of came out of him, like a mist, pouring all over and colouring the ground a weird colour. We hightailed it out of there as fast as we could, and started climbing. Big mistake but we didn’t have an option. Another fuck came flying down on us, Harry shouted at us to duck and we did so, but she wasn’t going for us. No she was going for Harry, sliced him deep and he just lay there while we got up and ran for a sky light.”

“Fuckin’ hell, how’d ya escape,” Angel asks. Skidmark didn’t look at him, but he gave a small nod.

“Sewer system.”

“Sewers? There’re always angels down there on purge night,” Angel interrupts. Good to know if I ever need some place to hide on ‘purge night’ from the terminator angels I was hearing about. Skidmark however ignores him as he goes on.

“After we fell through the skylight we found that there was a tunnel in the bathroom so we jumped down there. Got lost in the tunnels, after that it was a fucking game of hid and seek all fucking night against two angels, and whatever angel patrols were down there. Eventually we found a dark enough place in the sewers, found a pipe that was full, and drowned ourselves in there,” Angel looks at him in disgust while I look incredulous. However after a moment I realise that it wasn’t that bad a plan for something on the fly. If you can’t die by any other means than an angel’s weapon than it might be a good idea to just kill yourself and hid your body until it’s all over. Though sewer waters are supposed to be moving usually, at least when a person flushes, at least I think so.

“How did you keep your bodies from being discovered after you drowned yourself? Wouldn’t the water have dislodged you eventually?”

“Kinda what we had been hoping on, that it would dislodge us eventually after we drowned. We swam deep into the pipe is how, plus there ain’t a lot of water flow on purge night, just the usual flow of the water there. Either way, it worked. Our corpses didn’t come out of there for a month though… Drowning fucking sucks…” we sit there for a while. Skidmark looking disgruntled while we watch him. Neither Angel nor I are rude enough to interrupt Skidmark’s brood. I never knew Harry, but considering that not only had he reunited Skidmark and Squealer together, he had obviously been a friend. Skidmark looks up towards Angel Dust.

“You see what you fucking did ya spider cracker? We was having a good fucking time then you had to fuck it all up and shit.”

“Hey you’re the one that ain’t telling Doll face here basic fuckin’ information.”

“Pff, fuck off cracker,” Skidmark gets up and heads towards another room, “If I’m gonna have to listen to your bitch ass talk shit you better have some fucking beer or some shit.”

“Yeah I got a twelve pack yesterday, got a good deal for it.”

“Like a sale and shit, or you just sucked off the manager?”

“Eh, sale, the manager was an uptight broad,” not really knowing what to do in this situation I just sit there, Angel meanwhile examines his nails. With nothing else to do I ponder on the angels. Skidmark had said that they were like Terminators. I have never watched the movie myself. Mom and Dad had always said it was too violent for us when we would watch movies. I think I remember there being a movie night with it as the feature film while I was in the Wards. I had blown off the invitation though in favour of examining the latest footage of Defiant and Dragon’s fight against the Nine so I could take some notes on their current roster, as well as possible strategies to use against them.

If they were like terminators though, then it might be prudent to watch it, or better yet, to examine some footage of the purge. If the purge nights weren’t censored like Endbringer fights had been, then there should be a plethora of videos and such to examine in case I ever found myself in the situation of defending myself against an angel. Even if it was censored however, if it was a Hell wide phenomenon, then it would be somewhere, like the magic tomes that we had talked about being on Hell’s version of the internet, I would just have to dig deep to find the information I might need in the future. For now though…

“Do you mind if I try something out?” I ask Angel as I switch back to trying to focus on magic once more.

“Sure baby cakes, but just so you know, I charge double for women,” I don’t even roll my eyes. First I start feeling and sensing at the phantom lump that had been growing since I had supper last night, and the sensation had only gotten worse since breakfast. I feel around the area in my mouth, and once more find a sort of second set of almost nipple-like things. The first smaller set being there for spit and such things and more on the lower mouth than the others, the others though are bigger, thicker, and more on my lower tongue. If I was correct, and my appearance actually meant something then I might be able to make silk. Not as protective as spider silk but it would at least work better than transforming my various limbs into my costume, especially my new antennae since those senses could come in handy. Kind of like how you can force spit out of their little spit nipples, I flex a bit and-

I rush my hand up to my mouth as a pair of gooey silken projectiles fire out of my mouth and into my hand. There is still some liquid silk in my mouth and I spit it out onto my hand. Both the initial projectiles and the silk still left in my mouth harden into some silken thread.

“I assume that was supposed to happen?” Angel asks and I nod.

“Yeah… It seems that I can make silk.”

“Huh, cool I guess,” I make to reply to him that yes, it was in fact cool. When I hear something. I turn my head and move my antennae towards the doorway. With my regular hearing I can’t hear anything, but with my antennae now out, I can hear the stomping of feet up the stairs, at least six pairs of them. I rest my hand on the knife I had gotten from the lizard man and get up from my seated position.

“Something the matter?” Angel asks as he watches me.

“I don’t-” I hear the tell tale racketing of a gun and the cocking back of a few pistol slides. I don’t know who they are after, but better to be prepared. I make my way over to the wall beside the door, my knife now out and ready to take the first person that might try to break in.

“Six men I think, they have guns and are coming up the stairs. Anyone they might be after?” I look back at Angel and see that he’s already pulled a Tommy gun with some spider decals on it from somewhere.

“Not that I know of. This is Valentino’s turf. No one’s stupid enough to try shit on an Overlords turf.”

“Then you're underestimating human stupidity,” I can think of a few idiots that might decide it was a good idea to attack an Overlord’s territory, though I didn’t hear anything going on outside so they must be here for some sort of mission or something. I have a sneaking suspicion that they are going to come to this door. Skidmark comes walking back in from what I assume was Angel’s kitchen and sees us with our guns out.

“We might have company,” I simply say as Skidmark finishes a sip, puts down the beer, and pulls out a pistol from behind his back. He must not have been expecting trouble since he left his baseball cannon in the van. With his other hand he pulls out a cell phone and starts tapping. Outside I can hear someone talking.

“She went in here,” I hear someone outside say as footsteps get close to the door.

“They’re here,” I tell Angel and Skidmark softly. Angel has taken cover behind the table while Skidmark has entered another room and is peeking out with his pistol. I hear a run up from outside and the door bursts open. I stab at the breacher’s stomach and wrap a hand around his head to try and pull him away so I can deal with him out of Angel and Skidmark’s crossfire. The breacher is able to barely stop my knife however we do topple back my way. I hear some gunfire as Skidmark and Angel open up on the invaders, and something metallic hits the ground by me.

The demon looks like some sort of hell hound with black fur with red highlights in it around where his hair is thicker. We struggle on the ground for a moment. He’s trying to force me to drop my knife by putting pressure on my wrist. I push out with my extra limbs and decide to oblige him. I drop the knife into my other right hand and deliver a few swift jabs straight into his stomach. Surprise and pain fills his eyes and I push him off. As he is curled on the floor I waste no time stabbing him in the throat, then as he’s gurgling on the ground I roughly jerk his head up by the snout and shove roughly through the soft tissue under his jaw straight up. I meet only a bit of resistance as it penetrates past the roof of his mouth. His eyes roll back and he is no longer gagging on blood. I feel something come from him to me but I ignore it in favour of the fight.

I leave my knife in him and spot the thing that fell beside me. Some sort of carbine. The shooting has gone a bit quiet as I grab for the carbine, and suddenly I'm hit with the worst migraine I’ve ever felt. I grunt in pain. This must be what Lisa felt whenever she used her power too much. It lessens for less than a second before coming back, and then lessens again. I look up and see the grey bird demon who had been staring at me before. He’s looking between all three of us and holding his arms to the sides of his head. He’s in the doorway luckily or the others he is with might have started pouring in and we would be done for. However, as I try to reach for the carbine again, he looks at me extra long before moving to the others. The others Birdman’s with says something but I can’t register it well enough with the pain. They were going to come in and this would be over.

Remembering how my silk launched out like a projectile, I wait for him to look at me again and then fire off twin streams of silk at him. He shields himself from my projectile silk and I reach for the gun. Angel seems to have the same idea. I don’t bother trying for anything fancy. Just center mass and pull the trigger. The carbine gives a kick with each of my three pulls of the trigger, and I hear Angel’s Tommy and a bunch of other guns firing as I watch the bird man get ripped to shreds by lead. Once more, I feel something.

“Suppressing fire now!” I shout hoping that Angel understands what I mean. Whether or not he does however is irrelevant as he keeps firing at the corpse of Birdman and keeping their other compatriots from trying to advance through the room. Considering the kick from the carbine, this thing must at least have the power for what I’m planning on doing. I try to ignore the gunfire and focus more on my antennae’s magic sense. My hopes pay off and I see some of the fuzziness of magic through the walls. Sighting the centre mass of the largest concentration of fuzz at the back of their group, I let out three shots, and hear a scream of pain that brings a slight smile to my lips. Quickly I switch targets to the less powerful centres of fuzz. Three shots, switch, three shots, switch, three shots.

I approach the door and peek around the corner, ready to duck back into Angel’s apartment if any of them happen to still be in fighting condition. All four however are in no shape to fight as they are bleeding out and curled on the ground. Even so, I line up an execution shot for each, ending any kind of threat they might pose to us, until they heal back up. With each execution, I feel something. The raccoon demon at the back “gives” the same as the dog demon and the bird man, but the weasel, ant and canine demons barely gave enough for me to even notice. I pick up the pistols that they had and retreat back into the apartment. They had come for someone, likely me considering they had said that “she” was in this apartment, and they might have called in back up just in case they failed. Angel still has his Tommy up but he has his other guns on the table being reloaded with his other pairs of hands.

“They're dead?” Angel asks. I nod as I engage the safety and find the button to release the magazine of the carbine. I look over the magazine, and spot on the side it says that the magazine has a 25 round capacity. I shot five guys with three bullets each, then four more with their executions, meaning I had about six bullets left, not ideal, maybe I should have been more conservative with my bullets. I’ll have to see if two rifle calibre rounds were enough to take down a demon long enough to execute them.

I load the magazine back into the carbine and start patting down the dog demon. Luckily, He had two spare magazines. I also see a small bag that was tied to his pants belt. I untie that with my other limbs as I look him over for any kinds of symbols, but I don’t find anything of the like. Who were these people working for? I find a phone instead of a symbol. Generic background, most people like to personalise their phones, and password protected too. I put that in one of the pockets of my costume. Meanwhile I swap out the nearly empty magazine for a fresh one and put both the nearly empty one and the spare in the bag. I could hold the extra mags in there. Skidmark is already on the rather small bird man. In fact, with how small it looked, it almost looked more like a bird boy than a bird man.

Unfortunate but irrelevant at the moment, he had made his choice. We’d just defended ourselves. I start to make my way to the door to loot the other bodies of their ammo when I start hearing gunfire outside. Using my antennae, I sense the outside while I step beside the apartment window and peek out. I can hear a lot of gunfire and the squealing of tires. Lots of low caliber rounds going off, a not insignificant amount of higher calibers were being fired down there. I peek out the window and see people running for cover, taking videos on their phones, or running towards the firefight cocking pistols or ratcheting larger guns. Most of the ones with the guns looked to be Valentino’s enforcers.

Keeping from being spotted, I duck low and crouch walk to the other side of the window. It isn’t the smartest idea to be near a window when a gunfight was going on, but I want to see who’s fighting, maybe it would come in use later. I peek again, and all I can see is a large force of black clad and masked people advancing down the street, taking cover where they can and opening fire on damn well everyone and everything. I duck away from the window quickly before any stray bullets could accidentally find their way coming through the window. Unfortunately that little risk didn’t exactly pay off, but maybe I could find something on their phones?

Skidmark’s already gotten to the second one I had executed outside of Angel’s apartment, the ant. Angel meanwhile was looting the third, the canine. I take the liberty to waltz up to the one at the back that I had shot, the raccoon. He was the best dressed of them all. I push him over so that his corpse was lying on it’s back and start rifling through his pockets hoping to find his phone, and hopefully find it unlocked.

Then I hear a catchy little jingle coming from Skidmark. I turn around and see him pull out a stylish and expensive looking cell phone that wasn’t his. He probably got it from one of our assailants. He hits the receive call button and waits a second as a voice from the other side comes through.

“Brainiache, this is Snipes, did you take down that mind controlling bitch?” Brainiache. I know that name. I think he was a Ward in some other PRT/Protectorate department. We had met briefly during one of the cross department meetups. He had the power to induce highly debilitating migraines to any that he saw. He had been pretty new and didn’t really take his Wards training seriously, more there to have fun and meet other capes while being a hero. I… it’s vague but I think I remember briefly controlling him, before he was killed by an errant blast from Scion though I couldn’t really be sure. There was so many capes and powers under my control it was hard to pick out just a single one. While I pondered the name, Skidmark got a grin on his face.

“I’m sorry Snipes, it seems that Birdbrain ain’t able to take your call at the moment, I can take a message though,” the call after that went very quiet for a moment, before the voice on the other end, Snipes, comes through again, a barely restrained rage clearly audible for us to hear.

“What… did you do… to Brainiache?” I watch the phone intently. I think I remember Snipes as well. Another Ward. I don’t remember if they were from the same department but it wouldn’t be too far fetched. She had been some sort of minor Tinker/Thinker combo who specialised in long range sniper rifles and killing or incapacitating from afar. In training exercises with her we had to deal with an extremely good sniper who used fast acting tranquilliser darts. I had dealt with her easy enough when I had my bugs back then in the one training match we had been told to participate in. Simply fill her rifle with enough bugs while munching at delicate Tinker parts and the rifle had been rendered inoperable. I didn’t expect to have as easy a time if she was on the field and baying for my blood this time however.

“Oh Birdbrain here? Well me and my pals introduced him to the classic American greeting to home invaders, lead, and lots of it,” Angel joins in on taunting the ex Ward.

“Looks like his blood got splattered half way up the damn wall on the other side of the damn room, haha,” Skidmark added helpfully. Snipes had been hot headed and had raged when I had defeated her and her team in the training exercise. She said it wasn’t fair and demanded a rematch. I think I had just brushed her off. I didn’t really care to be there. It was more of a meet and greet, and I had more training exercises to do with other teams that were more competent than hers.

“When I find you fucks, I’m going to blow your fucking brains out, burn your corpses and spread the ashes all across Pentagram city,” I’m tempted to tell Snipes to stand down. While I had never been a ward team leader, I had commanded enough authority that people listened usually listened to me back then.

However, she was after me. Apparently someone had seen me just long enough to be able to positively identify me as the one mind controlling people at the end of the world. The two had known me, or rather known of me, during my Ward days and had probably spread that Weaver had been the one mind controlling people at the end of the world. I didn’t like it, but this costume was at the moment a liability. I’m about to transform it back to my rather comfortable fluffy fur coat when I realise that I had already been spotted in this costume, and people were acting on the appearance of it. They had already seen myself as Weaver come in with Skidmark. If they spotted Skidmark without Weaver, but me instead, it might paint a target on my back as well. Looks like it's back to secret identities, at least at the moment. After this I should look into possibly a different costume, or possibly an old one.

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	5. Chapter 5

The Skittering Chaos 5

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"End the call and hand me the phone," I tell Skidmark.

"What, but why?" I walk over to him and hold my hand out. He gives me the phone anyways, call still going.

"Weaver, you bitch! I heard what you fucking did! You think you can just fucking-" I hit the end call button on the phone and am greeted by a background with Brainiache's Demon form posing and taking a selfie with a long beaked brown bird holding a sniper rifle and a corpse underneath them. The snipe demon is looking proud and embarrassed at the same time as she is also posing with two fingers out while on top her kill. Her two fingers however are more hesitant and close to her body than Brainiache’s. I assume that the snipe demon is Snipes. Must have been why she was so angry when Skidmark and Angel were taunting her about how we blew Brainiache apart.

"Angel, do you know how to find the number on these things?" I ask. Angel however just shrugs and pulls out a flip phone for me to see before putting it away. I look over to Skidmark.

"Yeah I can find it. Should be in the settings," I toss him the phone.

"Good, find it and put your phone into it. If we get separated we can keep in contact," I look over to Angel Dust. "Will you come along with us?"

"Hell yeah doll face, I can't let my dealer bite the dust. Who else is dumb enough to try and muscle in on Valentino's drug racket?"

"Hey! I thought me and Val was good!?" Skidmark remarks and Angel snorts as he lets out a small giggle.

"Pfft, you wouldn't even make it down the street if I wasn't bribing the local lieutenant with my sweet ass every time you came over."

"Less talking, Skidmark, get the number of the phone and then get your number into that phone, we need to get out of here quick before the mob comes," I try to get them back on task while I watch the stairs.

"Yeah yeah, just a sec," Skidmark says while waving vaguely in my direction as he has his head stuck in Brainiache’s phone.

"Angel do you have Squealer's number?"

"Sure do, had it ever since Skids here passed out on my couch one time after a bender and ended up here instead of home by accident. Actually how we first met."

"Cute,” I comment. While that was a nice story and such, we need to stay focused here. “Skidmark, where's Squealer right now?"

"Probably went to meet with the rep to drop off the sheit. So she'd be a coupla blocks away now at least. Uh, that way I think," Skidmark points off in a direction.

"Angel, any place over there where we can meet Squealer at without getting onto a main street?"

"Yeah sure, I know a place. I've been on a few corners over there. There's a discount shop called "Faust's Discount Deals." We can take the side streets and a few of the shorter alleyways to get there quickly enough."

"Good, call Squealer and tell her to meet us at Faust's. Skidmark, have you put your number in there yet?"

"Yeah I got it in there and shit," I can hear the gunshots getting closer while we talk. From what I saw, Valentino's enforcers were trickling in to try and defend the street, but they hadn't been able to muster in full force. They could maybe hold off the crowd of vigilantes back for a couple of minutes, but they would be pulling back soon to regroup and counter attack. We need to be gone before they are routed.

"Good, pass me the phone. let's get moving then. I don't want to be here when the mob shows up," Skidmark tosses me Brainiache's phone and I slip it into a pocket that was in my dark Weaver costume. The gunfire is getting louder and more numerous as we wait around. Where before it had been a couple of people shooting, it is starting to sound like a war down there.

"Fucking hell, how many are out there?"

"I don't know, looked about maybe a hundred or so out there fighting a couple groups of Valentino's men," I start making my way down the stairs, making sure to check corners, and I use a bit of magic to transform my mask back on. Angel Dust's neighbours hopefully hadn't gotten a good look at my face, the few that had peeked out had ducked back into their apartments when they saw me walk out of the apartment and execute the ones I had shot through the wall. Other neighbours peek their heads out as we pass, looking at us with curious eyes. As we get near the ground floor, the gunfire has gotten closer. I look to Angel.

"Is there a back door?"

"Yeah, just down the stairs."

"Good, you take point. You know these streets better than I," meanwhile Skidmark has been fiddling with his phone, has started calling someone, and finally the ringing gives away to Squealer's voice.

"Hey Skiddy, any trouble?"

"Yeah, mother fucking vigilante shits fucking showed up to fuck up Skitty."

"Wait shit really!?" we descend the last set of stairs and just as we reach the bottom a pair of demons, a monkey demon and a bovine demon, are running in. Myself and Angel open fire on the demons, I fire five shots from my carbine, two into the monkey demon in front, a chest shot and attempted head shot, and three into the bovine demon behind the monkey. The first is filled with small arms fire from Angel while the one behind I manage to slot two of the three shots into his head. I feel a small rush of energy as the two die.

I note my accuracy, decent, but not as good as when I had my bugs. I'm really missing my bugs right now. They had allowed me to cheat with guns, almost allowing me to trace a line to the target and I could guide my body to fire along that line. Now though, I have to rely on the accuracy I had gained during my time in the PRT firing range. While I'm accurate, without my bugs I’m more likely to miss.

"Jesus! I'm coming Skiddy!"

"Babe, we're gonna get the fuck outta here! Meet us at, uh, where the fuck is Faust's?" we follow Angel as he makes his way around the stairs and towards the back of the room, I take the rear and keep my carbine trained on the front door. Someone else tries to get through the door, I see a gun and let loose another three shots. None connect however and the demon about to enter takes cover by the doorway. I send another two to keep him and anyone else pinned. Then I follow Angel Dust and Skidmark through a door to another hallway.

"Back door’s this way," Angel says. While I had been shooting, Angel had returned to just using two hands and is only carrying two relatively light looking pistols, likely so he won't get weighed down. I wish I had the opportunity to pay attention to him pulling and putting weapons away. A power like Miss Militia's would be a god send at this moment, not having to worry about ammunition or even having a more destructive weapon to make our pursuers question whether we’re really worth it.

"'Kay that's fucking great and shit but I still don't fucking know where Faust's is!"

"It's down Sucker's street, if you see a Chinese restaurant lookin' place, go down that road, that's 180th ave but the sign for that avenue got blown up a month ago and no one has replaced it. Faust's place has an inflated demon mascot in front."

"You get that?" Skidmark asks into his phone. We near the end of the hall and outside of the window a figure appears. Angel however lets loose a barrage of pistol shots. Causing spider web cracks to spread throughout the glass as the figure on the other side splatters the window with red.

"Sucker's street and 180th, gotcha, see you there."

"If she gets the time, tell her to cover up the merchant's symbol!" I call out to Skidmark. I see the door we had just gone through open up behind us as we reach the end of the hall. I fire five shots through it before following the others to the back door that is nearby the window. The back door is hiding in a little alcove that is hard to see from the hallway. I feel another rush of energy. Seems I hit someone.

"-up the Merchant stuff on the side!" Skidmark calls into his phone before hanging up and running through the door. It's some sort of fire escape but as we go through no alarm fires off. Guess that was disabled some time ago.

Angel is behind a dumpster by the door and has swapped over to one of his custom decaled Tommy guns. Was that a quirk of his power or did he just like to make them that way?

I take cover by the door while Skidmark fires his pistol over the dumpster at a few demons that try to head down our alleyway. I spot a few downed demons laying on the concrete, bleeding out, and then I spot a demon poking his head out at the other end of the alley and trying to line up a shot at us. Lining up my own shot, I breathe out as I try to stabilise my aim, and send off a trio of shots. I see the first impact by his face, sending brick and mortar fragments flying out and joining the rest of the debis that is flying up from Angel's blind firing. The next two however seem to hit him, one in his chest, and the other catching his neck. Another rush of energy. If only I knew more than just how to blast everything close to me away.

I hear hoof beats from down the hall we just came from and I aim my pistol in my lower right arm towards the hallway. As someone comes sprinting down the hall, I open fire and nail him point blank with a half a dozen pistol rounds before I turn my carbine on him and deliver a couple rounds into his chest. The deer-like demon falls back and I see someone else behind him take cover by the wall. I turn my carbine on the drywall of where I think the demon is and let loose a couple shots.

"They're flanking us!" I shout and sporadically fire my pistols at the wall to keep them in cover.

"Damn I wish cherry was here right now," Angel comments as he reloads his Tommy gun and begins blind firing again.

"Gimme a sec I'll make sure the fuckers can't get us from there," Skidmark says and I'm about to ask what he means when he rushes over to me. I get out of his way as he goes past, then he does some sort of gesture with his hand, and I see a blue line form in front of the alcove. More blue lines start forming and sometimes they layer over top. Skidmark's power, or some magical equivalent of it. Good for area denial among other things.

I aim down the alleyway, watching for someone to poke their head out before looking behind us. The way is clear so we could move down it while under covering fire from Angel. Or maybe.

I look to Skidmark who's still laying down layers. It's gotten to the point where it is starting to look like some sort of tinker tech force field. Taking the risk, I poke my head in and use a bit of magic to return my mask into its original antennae form and watch as Skidmark lays down some more force fields. I watch as he quickly designates a line on the ground, and uses that to raise a barrier of magic. The barrier comes with a condition, almost... almost like some sort of, if statement from programming or something. it's close, kind of. Maybe that's my brain coming up with something familiar but it kind of fits with what I’m sensing.

He sets down a barrier and sets the condition of what happens when something interacts with the barrier without a second thought, making it a thin one way acceleration field. I... might be able to do something similar, or maybe even... reverse it? Or I could just add other effects to the barrier. Maybe make it so that whoever touches the barrier sets on fire? I would have to figure out how to make fire though and how exactly it fits together.

My musing is cut off as Skidmark breaks from cover and stands in the open opening fire with his pistol down the hallway. I hear a boom-

"Christ!" I shout but hear nothing. All I can hear is the boom of Skidmark's shots as they pass by his barrier, and the vibration shaking the building. It's like standing next to an explosion. My ears are ringing and everything I'm getting from my antennae is scrambled.

I look over and Angel is trying to say something while a second set of hands are holding his ears. I shake my head and morph my antennae back into my mask. Without the capacity to communicate I need to act and hope that the ringing goes away quickly. Following along with what Skidmark did, I start layering barriers down in the alleyway. Almost immediately I notice that the dust is getting worse down the alleyway as the debris kicked up by Angel's gun starts creating bigger divots and throwing up more dust and debris the more of Skidmark's barriers I put down. I don't put down as many as Skidmark however, I would rather not end up permanently deaf.

I move over to Skidmark and give him a shake. He looks over to me and I motion for us to leave with one of my arms. He nods and we both exit the building. Angel is reloading again and I shake his arm as well. He manifests a pistol but looks over first. I motion that we leave and he nods.

I look back and see a trio of demons come out of the dust only for the first to bounce off my barriers and fly back as if given a very powerful shove. I let loose a trio of shots from my carbine at the three stunned demons. More booms as they pass through and I see showers of red mist fly from each of the three demons as my bullets hit centre mass on each of them. Nearly instantaneously I feel a flow of energy as the demons die in the alleyway.

I'm definitely going to see if I can modify my new weapons with these barriers, especially if I can somehow reduce the sound of the bullet's additional acceleration. Maybe if I could figure out other conditions to add to it, I could add a muffling effect?

Angel rounds a corner and I am about to follow when another of the vigilantes approaches the barriers I had put down. He’s a big demon covered head to toe with some sort of scrap armour and armed with something that looks almost like a cannon. He’s also riding some sort of scrap moped or motorized bike. I raise my carbine and sight him, though when I pull the trigger but nothing comes out. While I have him sighted he raises his cannon and fires off to the side of the barrier, and I watch as the deep blue of the layered barriers decreases visibly. I turn back around and follow down the turn that Angel and Skidmark had taken. As I run to catch up with them I release the magazine, toss it into the bag I had at my side and rummage around for the other magazines. I grab a magazine and slot it in, then release the catch.

I feel a buzz coming from Brainiache’s phone, I pull it up as we run and see a text pop up.

Bigman: Went down allwy geton it birdy

Then another buzz as something else comes up. Was it some sort of group chat? These people had gotten organised fairly quickly, that or they had been working together for some time. Would make sense that in a city full of villains that the vigilante’s would group up together.

Aerial Ace: k gotcha

“We got more company!” I shout as we enter onto a side street and I can kind of hear it. My shout is still somewhat muffled but at least the ringing from the bullets is going away quickly. People are looking and pointing at us, some have gotten phones out while it looks like a couple of thugs that had Valentino patches start scrambling about, some heading into alleyways towards where the main crowd of vigilante’s are, while some are heading towards us. Though when they see Angel, he makes finger guns, pretends to shoot them and they stop looking our way. Seems they are on our side for now.

“Might be some kind of aerial attack,” I continue.

“Mother fucker I hate fucking flyers!” Skidmark shouts back. Then just as we are about to pass by an alleyway that a squad of Valentino’s thugs are entering, a jet of flame pours out, covering the gang members with flames. They scream out in agony while thrashing around, dropping and rolling but the flames stick to the ground like napalm. I watch the thugs thrash for a second. With the possible range on that flamethrower we might not get far.

“Skidmark! Barriers, now!” I shout and don’t wait as I start putting down barriers. Skidmark, I note, starts putting down barriers immediately as the barrier layers we are setting down quickly create a bright blue glow. Angel, while avoiding the fire, steps out and begins opening fire with his Tommy gun. Once more, I’m nearly deafened as what looks like some sort of miniature Balrog gets pushed back by the bullets that Angel is putting down range.

“Come on!” I shout as hard as I can. I don’t want to get caught up in a fight against some fliers. Sure I could possibly fly with my wings but I haven’t had any practice with it whatsoever.

We break away from firing at the mini Balrog and head across the street away from the fighting. We are nearing another alleyway when I hear some sort of motor vehicle heading our way. I look and there’s the scrap demon riding his moped this way with his cannon pointed right at us, while up above I see something. Not even thinking I dive for cover in the alleyway. I hear a blast and the building corner behind me breaks apart as it’s hit by whoever is shooting at me. With that moped demon we are probably not going to be able to get away quickly enough. I roll over to the wall that will cover me from his view and sit up with my back against the building.

The scrap demon rounds the corner on his moped and I watch as he stuffs something in his gun. Seeing my chance, I fire a half a dozen shots into his scrap moped and two more at his gun. Scrap demon gets off his moped and is rearing up to clobber me with his spiky fists as I release a blast of magical energy and he smashes back into the wall. Seeing my opportunity, I do a half leap from crouch and straddle him. I jab both my pistols under his scrap helmet and into his unprotected chin. I start pulling the triggers on my guns as fast as they can fire as I mag dump whatever is left in my pistols into his chin. I also round my carbine on him and let loose two shots into where I think I can see eyes.

I feel a rush of energy, greater than both Brainiache and any of the other demons I’ve killed lately. I can kind of see into the helm and the picture isn’t pretty. From the looks of it the skull of the demon had burst open like an egg. It just looks like a bloody mess inside of the helm and I can’t even identify anything specific. As I get up from the dispatched demon, I realise that I’m covered in blood again.

“Fucking hell,” Skidmark remarks as he comes over to see my handy work. “First Lung and now this, remind me not to fucking piss you off.”

“You sure you ain’t a spider?” Angel asks as he comes over. “Cause the way you straddled him, then killed him, well lets just say I know a nice black widow that’s famous for that,” bug jokes… fun. Maybe if we weren’t in such a dangerous situation I could have taken a crack at that as well. Show off some of the bug jokes I had accidentally found while researching various bugs.

“Had I died in Brockton Bay, I might have been,” I say as I gesture down the alleyway while my lower limbs handle the reloading of my various guns.

“Hey, never enough spiders around these days,” Angel is about to turn when he looks up to something behind me. Without hesitation I turn, my carbine following as I aim at whatever Angel is looking at, only to see what seems to be a massive rising cloud of smoke.

“Oh shit… we gotta go,” Angel remarks and I nod. I let my mask unfold for a second back into my antennae and I can sense a large amount of magic being used in that cloud of smoke. I reform my mask and Skidmark and I start following Angel again.

“What is that?” I ask as we run down the alley to another street.

“That’d be my boss. Valentino. Guess all the gunfire finally interrupted one of his shows. What you’re seeing there? That’s his smoke, kinda his thing. See he can make his smoke do all kinds of things.”

“Like knock out everyone fighting?” I ask.

“More than just that. Lets say he can also make smoke tentacles and other stuff. Either way, I’d rather not get caught up in all that shit, and not just ‘cause I don’t wanna wake up naked and locked up in someone basement.”

“Why’s that?” Skidmark asks the obvious question.

“Other than I would really rather not wake up in some guy’s basement naked and chained to the wall? Well let’s see. I’d probably end up on Val’s shit list for being around you, and you Merchants would end up working for Val as a bunch of whores, and I kind of like you guys, you get me drugs so I don’t have to buy them from Val, so I don’t really want that to happen to ya.”

“Like fuck would I let your boss ho my Squealer!” Skidmark shouts in outrage. “Or, uh, you,” he adds lamely to me while we jog down the street. I didn’t really expect him to care much about me anyways. I’m actually surprised that he actually cared enough to add that last bit. Granted he is trying to recruit me but still.

“What cow-tits? Nah she’s got enough brain not to get caught after shit goes tits up. Nah nigga I’m talkin’ ‘bout you and Dollface,” Skidmark?

“Me?” Skidmark echoes my internal question.

“Yeah you, you know, oh hey cross here, that’s 180th ave, we’re nearly there, just a straight shot down here to Sucker’s street and we should be at Fausts. Anyways, you know that lesbian faun couple that Val’s got around him all the time, stared in a couple pornos and such?” I have no idea what he is talking about but Skidmark nods along with what Angel’s saying.

“Oh yeah, I seen them a few times when me and Squeals are winding down for the day with a nice movie.”

“More like winding each other up to go for it, anyways, what if I told ya one of ‘em used to be a buck.”

“Wait shit really?”

“Yeah, no shit. Watch their debut, “Bad End for Erin,” it’s old enough that it’s probably in the bargain bin or something like that. It’s real nice shit. Like, you can see the moment when Erin goes completely fuck drunk when he…“ I pull out the magazine from my carbine and quickly check the bullets I have left in the magazine before slotting it back in. I’m definitely not trying to distract myself from their conversation.

“Anyways, that’s what he’ll do to you if he ever caught ya, probably display ya like a trophy as another rival he crushed or some shit. Not that you’re really a rival at all.” Angel ignores Skidmark’s outburst after such a remark and we enter into the alley that will lead us to Faust’s and Squealer.

“And you?” Angel says looking me up and down once more. “Well with that face and that ass, and the fact that people are trying to kill you for being you, you’d probably be joining me up on those billboards,” I stare at him hard but he doesn’t elaborate, and I prefer it that way. There are much more pressing things to worry about than my possible forced employment in Valentino’s organisation.

We exit the alleyway and I can see down the street an inflated demon doing an exaggerated pose with a bag of money. I can also see the Merchant’s van, the Merchant’s logo having been either erased or sprayed over with black spray paint. As I see Squealer see us, she starts the engine of the van. At the same time, I hear a phone chime as we start running to the van. I pull out Brainiache’s phone and hit the accept call button, then speaker while we approach the van.

“You think you can get away that easily?” the person on the other end, Snipes, asks. Then I hear a shot, and pain lances through my right knee. I tumble to the ground, mere meters away from the van. The others turn towards me while I roll and look in the direction of the shot, using my legs to push me back along with my arms.

There are sounds coming from the phone but I ignore them. Snipes has us in her sight, I can see her, or rather I can see the glint of light reflect off her scope and a flash. I let out a blast of energy, and try to direct it forwards, while also putting down a barrier in front of me, trying to...

I feel something hit my head, and then darkness.

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I wake up, bolt upwards and let out a blast of energy forwards… and accidentally send Skidmark flying back. The van shudders as he hits the back and lets out an oof.

“Haha, holy shit you sent him flying,” Angel says beside me. He’s kneeling in the back of the van.

“The hell’s going on back there?” Squealer shouts from the front. I look to the front and see the cityscape going by in the windows.

“Yup, moment you went down Skids started putting down barriers.”

“Guess I put enough down or something, Oooooh, shit girl. Ah! Fuck my back. Agh. Mmmmmmhh.”

“Yeah, that, plus your magic blast, I guess kept the bullet from hittin’ ya too hard.”

“How long was I out?” Angel shrugs while Skidmark pulls himself from the van doors I smashed him into while he presses a hand against his back, a pained expression.

“I don’t know, a minute, the bullet didn’t exactly get all the way through ya skull, it’s actually kinda stuck there, Skids was trying to get it out when ya blasted him.”

“Sorry,” I apologise lamely to Skidmark. Skidmark just waves it off however with his other hand as slowly he starts looking less and less pained.

“Nah nah, it’s fine. Egh. Good thing we left those guns though. Shit. Or ya’d have fuckin’ blown my head off like that other poor fucker,” Skidmark straightens up a bit and stands up once more.

“Did she try to follow us?” I ask, this time however, Squealer answers.

“Yeah she did. Had some guy with wings or whatever try to follow us, but we lost them in a couple of seconds. Wing guy was like a couple blocks away, and I turned onto the main road. Lots of vans like ours on it.”

“Alright good,” now that we’re safe, I lay back once more, and let out a sigh. I let my costume unfold along with my mask, and just lay there on the van floor in my borrowed clothes. Quickly though, I lean up once more. Since we have some down time… Maybe?

“You know that’s not the first time I’ve done that.”

“Hmm, done what?” Angel asks.

“Mutilated someone while straddling them.”

“Okay…”

“Right, Lung,” Skidmark pipes in. “Didn’tchu cut out his eyes or some shit?”

“Wait really? Damn girl, you’re brutal. Remind me to never let you take charge in bed, ‘cause I’d rather not end up like some noble’s play thing after they’re done,” Mentally I note to watch out for the nobility here since they seem to be rather excessive with their “playthings.” Things die off after that as we ride on…

I had meant to make a joke there…


	6. Chapter 6

The Skittering Chaos 6

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I check on my leg which they had managed to bandage up somewhat decently with what little they have, which appears to be a tee-shirt. I look over to Skidmark and note that some of his shirt is ripped off. I put some pressure on the wound to try and keep it from bleeding as much, as the shirt bandage is growing increasingly red.

Actually, I could possibly pull back my limb like Angel showed me with my arms. Would that stop the bleeding at least? Or would it cause internal bleeding? Experimentally I attempt the same transformation to my leg as I did when I hid my lower arms. The leg disappears for a moment, then I exert a bit of magic to bring it back.

I frown, the blood is still spreading.

“Can you help me put pressure on this Skidmark?” I ask as I put my hand back.

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

“Angel?” I ask seeing as he’s still standing off to the side. He doesn’t look too concerned however.

“What me? Sorry sister, these clothes and this fur don’t mix with blood doll-face. Besides, with our natural healing you’ll be hard pressed to die of something like that.”

“Really?”

“Yup,” Angel says as he rises and puts a hand to the wall of the van. “Small wound like that? I say healed in a couple of minutes at most if you keep the pressure up. Longer if you just let it bleed and start moving around and such.”

“That good to know,” I muse as I look over my leg wound. It doesn’t feel like it is healing, but then, a person doesn’t really feel anything as their body scabs a scrape over. “Anything else that might be good to know about my new demon hood?” I continue. Angel strikes a pose with his hand reaching underneath his chin.

“Well, other than the fact that we can use magic and are harder to kill than the average human, we also don’t age, well, the ones of us that were humans don’t age. The Hellborn age a bit, but they’re like super slow ageing so you could be dealing with your little guy being a lil scamp for a while there,” the last part is addressed to Skidmark and Squealer.

“Other than, well the natural stuff that some demons get right off the bat, like me being able to make a web and you with your silk spit, we can also transform into our true demon form.”

“True demon form? The fuck you talking about?”

“We have a more demonic form beyond this one?” Angel shrugs at our questions.

“Eh, yeah, kinda. Some people call it a true demon form. I don’t know myself. I just know it makes you more powerful and stuff.”

“If you know that it makes you more powerful, then why didn’t you use it when we were fighting?” I ask both curious and mildly incredulous. Angel once more shrugs at my question.

“’Cause my ‘true demon form’ doesn’t actually change anything when I use it, especially since I’m more of a gunslinger than a magic man, ya dig?” seeing an opportunity, I transform my mask back into antennae.

“How do you summon your guns? Do you make them or do you just pull them from a pocket dimension?”

“It’s the second one. I got all my babies here custom made or custom decaled after a while,” at the mention of his guns, he proceeds to pull one out of his pocket dimension. He points out to the custom decals that he has all over his Tommy gun. I note how the magic swirls around his hand as he pulls up his decaled gun, how it seems to reach into something and pull something out. ”How’d you figure it out?”

“There was a cape in the Bay named Circus, also on Coil’s payroll. She was a grab bag cape who had a pocket dimension that she used to hold her tools and likely loot.”

“God damn it! I swear to God everyone who wasn’t one of the gangs was sucking on that mans dick.”

“Not always willingly,” I comment, remembering back to Lisa. “He really started pushing to bring on more capes during the time when the Undersider’s became Warlords and took over most of the underworld. Even Leet and Über were on his payroll at the end there.”

“Sounds like my boss, only with super villains instead of whores,” I nod along with Angel’s statement.

“Nearly took control of the heroes too. Only we killed him before he was even able to properly make use of them… I learned later that he was the shortest lived PRT director in history.”

“Huh, really. He sounds like he was a big shot before ya offed him. You think he’s the reason these schmucks came to blast ya?” I shrug as we keep pressure on my leg. Though, the bleeding has gone down, and the pressure doesn’t hurt as much.

“No, there was some other reason. I think I got at least one of them killed during my final days on Earth,” Angel winces at that.

“Oof, sucks to be them I guess. Killed by ya twice. Ya know if they didn’t try to fuck you up on Val’s turf ya might have gotten yourself an eternal enemy the moment they regenerated,” my expression turns inquisitive while I look at Angel.

“Why would that not be the case?” after all, if a person has eternity ahead of them, excluding angel attacks that is, then wouldn’t they inevitably end up in a position to try to kill those that wronged them?

“Well Val ain’t exactly the kind of person that just lets things go. If he catches them, they’re gonna find out pretty quick what he does to people who fuck with him on his turf,” considering that if he caught any of us he would turn us into whores, I can guess what the various dead vigilantes’ fates will be.

“Actually I should probably get back there. Val ain’t know where I am right now, and he can get pretty possessive. Plus, I can put in a “good” word for your attackers,” Angel puts in some quotation marks around good.

“What? Ya can’t stay Angie?” Squealer asks from the front.

“Nah, with raiders and shit running around, Val’s gonna want to get all of his favourites together so that he can make sure we don’t get hurt. Can’t make a porno with dead stars am I right?” I watch as he finally puts his Tommy gun away into his pocket dimension. I watch as it disappears and, like before, note how the magic interacts with the gun. It’s similar to hiding away limbs.

“Yeah, makes sense. Next time you're over though, make sure to bring Fat Nuggets, Mark loves ‘em.”

“Yeah sure, I don’t see why not,” considering that Angel is a close friend of the Merchants, and one of Valentino’s favourites, this is a golden opportunity that I can’t let slide away.

“Angel,” I begin my question. “Would you be able to tell us what is going on with Valentino?”

“What like a snitch?”

“Not exactly how I would put it. While learning his secrets would be nice I was more thinking along the lines of informing us of what he may be thinking of doing on the day to day, or what he may be looking into doing.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you want me to be a gossip monger on my boss?” Angel gives me a hard stare, before he shrugs, “Eh sure why not? I already tell Cherri all this stuff anyways. I’ll just ask her to see if she can make it so we can all be on call at the same time.”

“Good,” the van begins to slow down, so I ask my final question for Angel. “Do you know how to find someone in Hell?” Angel opens up the back of the van as we come to a stop but he looks back, and his eyes look up in thought.

“Ah, I think I know a guy or two. I’d have to check but I can call you back with his number and such. He’s old fashioned however so you’ll have to make an appointment with him before he’ll even think of getting to work on finding your guy.”

“Who ya lookin’ for? Your pops?” Sherrel asks, concern in her voice. I don’t even want to think about that at the moment. I… I know that Lisa was keeping something from me. Someone had died that she wasn’t telling me about. I… I hope it wasn’t Dad.

“No, I lost a teammate a while back. Regent.”

“He the faggy looking renaissance guy right?” I want to glare at Skidmark but I remember that I had thought the same of Alec when I first saw him, if not in such a crass way. It didn’t look like Angel minded the rudeness either. Hell, Alec wouldn’t care either now that I think about it. He would probably have some quip prepared and go along with it.

“That’s right,” is all I say in response.

“Sheit. How’d he die?” Skidmark asks but Angel interrupts.

“Seeing as we are getting to some depressin’ shit, I’m out. Hey I’ll call you later Skitter when I get the details of that guy I know,” I nod as Angel steps out of the van and slams the door behind him. I stare at the van door where Angel left out of for a few moments as the van once more picks up speed.

I ease off the pressure on my leg for a bit and watch to see if the bleeding continues, and sees that it doesn’t. I let out a sigh, and scoot back until my back hits the back of the seats. I lean my head back.

“It was just a few months after you two had died…” I start as we continue driving on in the Pentagram city traffic.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

We arrive back at the warehouse unscathed. Turns out Sherrel hadn’t had time to even meet the representative before we got jumped. Makes sense really, Even if she had managed to get to the representative, she still wouldn’t have unloaded the product for them. I stayed back in the van, while also having morphed my costume back when I felt my leg had healed enough. The wound is a scabby mess. However, the outermost scabs are already getting dry and flaking off, revealing healthy light greyish skin underneath.

I pretty much stayed in the van the whole time that they met with the representative, just gazing out the window at the city and at the pentagram in the sky. Getting out of the van I look up at the large “Merchants” banner, and make a comment.

“We need to get rid of that sign,” at which I see Adam turn towards me with a perplexed expression.

”What? Why?”

“We arrived at Angel’s place in a Merchant’s vehicle. They may realise that I was with you, or at least realise that the ‘M’ you had on your van is the same ‘M’ that you have up there.”

“Shit. You right.”

“Aww,” Sherrel whines. “But I spent so long on that banner…”

“We can put it back up when this all calms down,” I don’t mention that they could just kick me out. While they are drug dealers they have been kind enough to let me stay with them for a while, and I realised after that Angel didn’t have my phone number and he would be calling Adam in order to get in contact with me. That and the Merchants had resources that I could make use of. While I’m certain I could do alright just starting from scratch, it was always nice to get a bit of help at the beginning.

“Yeah…” Sherrel says glumly as we make out way inside of the warehouse. Mimi and the demon guy are in there, Mimi is off to the side gazing into a magazine or a comic book, while the imp is watching something on a tiny television in the corner.

“Hey! Just cause we go on a run don’t mean you get to slack off!”

“We weren’t slacking off,” Mimi protests, while the imp quickly rushes to turn off his mini tv.

“Really now?” Sherrel says having made her way over to the workbench that is at the side of the garage of the warehouse. There’s what appears to be some sort of large panels made out of scrap metal beside it, and an engine on the workbench itself. The scrap metal slabs look big enough to fit on the van. Sherrel looks over the various scrap panels for a second before she starts talking again.

“I can see that you welded the armour bits together, but did you fix up the engine like I asked?” the mouse and imp demons look at each other for a moment before the imp answers.

“We didn’t know what was wrong with it?” Sherrel sighs as she steps away from the workbench.

“Guess I should have expected that.”

“Did you dust?” Skidmark asks and Mimi nods.

“Yeah, was done in a flash,” Mimi punctuates that with a snap of her fingers. I almost sense her magic flare with that but it stays back. I’d have to test that out later, see what it produces. Could just be a cleaning spell or something. Still, useful. Skidmark looks at her for a long moment, then nods.

“Alright then. Just make sure the plants get their second watering, I don’t wanna have even a single plant die cause of some missed watering.”

“Sure thing mister boss man,” Mimi says, then turns to me.

“Are you going to show up bloody every time you get back here or did you just get unlucky again?” I look down at my state of dress. My fluffy jacket is stained with red again. Not as bad as when the lizards had bled all over me though. Plus, due to the texture of my bodysuit, it's much easier to clean and get blood off of than the fluffy jacket. However my jacket did stain from the blood that was still on it.

“I got unlucky again.”

“You know I know a good way to get the blood out of that jacket of yours if you want to know how,” Mimi says, and I stop to look at her, curious.

“You do?” if I keep getting bloody like this, it might do to figure out how to get blood out of a jacket like this. It is rather comfy to wear around.

“Yeah… I had a bloody nose when I was a kid and just let it drip onto the carpet. I was in my bed and I didn’t do anything while it bled. Eventually it stopped and I went back to sleep. Grandma eventually found it made me figure out how to clean it up. It had kind of crystallised by then as well.”

“Perhaps we can swap notes then later?” I say before I move to rejoin Sherrel and Adam as they make their way up the stairs.

“Yeah, sure. Maybe another time then,” Mimi calls back and I wave before starting up the stairs. I can socialise later, I need to think right now.

How would I pay for this person Angel said he would tell me about? At least on the surface Hell is at least somewhat capitalistic, considering that there were shops around and they had an agreed upon currency if the money I saw Skidmark counting out back at Angel’s apartment is anything to go by.

Obviously I could join the Merchants proper, with the stipulation that they would fund the search for Alec, possibly with my pay. Though I didn’t exactly have a place to stay so I would also be forced to live here in the warehouse or find a place that didn’t require rent.

Though that brought up the question of if the Merchants even had the resources to sustain a search for Alec, depending on the cost of the search. For all I knew this is some kind of premium service that people charge top dollar for.

“Is this everyone?” I ask out loud as we ascend the stairs.

“In the Merchants? Yeah, you’re actually our fifth… you know, if you join,” Sherrel remarks as Adam starts making his way up to the office space above,taking two stairs at a time. I’m possibly the fifth member of the Merchants if I join. That’s not a large amount of Merchants. How new is this operation? Or were they not so big on trying to expand as they were in life? Do the Merchants even count as a gang here? They have at most a building that they own and control, and a van that they sell out of. If drugs are legal here, then they could just be a business. They even seem to get most of their money from a larger distribution service that paid them for drugs for their vending machines, at least if Adam’s remark about it being their ‘first big break’ is anything to go by.

I’ll have to see what exactly their profit margins were. I’d handled my own finances when I was a warlord in the Bay and had done relatively well in balancing my budget enough to keep from having to bother Lisa for help with it, beyond the first couple times. I did quite well with my finances compared to some of the other Undersiders like Alec and Rachel. Though the only time Rachel ever screwed up on her finances and needed assistance with that was when she would create a new shelter for her dogs and she sometimes went overboard stocking it up and getting everything she needed for the dogs. Alec and Aisha were just too lazy to balance their budget and would just spend their earnings on whatever fit their fancy. At least they got better when Lisa finally hired an accountant for them.

Perhaps there is another way I could make money to possibly fund my search for Alec. I know that silk is a fairly sought after material. Parian had made a comment about it once but I didn’t really have the time to properly set anything up that I could have taken advantage of except for a few roles of fabric that I would send to Parian.

I could see about leveraging my own silk into something useful. Depending on the properties of my own silk I could possibly see about making an outfit with it. My own silk outfits had been relatively effective things; combined with ballistic plates it made my costume a very effective set of body armour. Perhaps if I managed to become proficient enough in weaving with my own silk I could take commissions for these so called nobles. But then I didn’t know how to weave without an army of spiders at my beck and call. That alone had taken months to finally figure out. Figuring out how to properly weave with my silk would take time.

Though I could see about just selling the material to someone in the city and using the revenue brought in to pay for my keep as well as the search. Though I would have to find a buyer, and I would have to see if I could even produce enough silk in order to sell enough of it.

“I’m going to shower off this blood,” I say as we get into the loft. Sherrel just shrugs and nods, while Skidmark has sat himself down and has turned on the television. I enter into their bathroom and begin my quick shower routine, now adding in getting the blood off my wings once I transform them from the fluffy coat.

As I shower I continue to think on the merits of my two ideas for gaining revenue. While the silk production route would be the straightest forward, if it works, it would also get me no closer to improving life around here. Considering that the government of Hell is nowhere to be seen in regards to law and order, it seems that everything has devolved into warlordism like the Bay did after Leviathan, only it is actually legitimate to be a warlord in Hell.

As such, if I want to make a positive impact on a section of Hell I would have to claim some territory and improve it. While I could make some revenue from selling silk, I could also work with the Merchants at the same time. Considering that the new Merchants here are only four demons and a baby, I’m in a position of possibly being a founding member of the new Merchants.

I could guide them to being less despicable than they were in the past. No forced recruitment, no pushing drugs on the vulnerable, perhaps even a different primary source of income? At the moment however, drugs seem to be the main source of revenue here.

Manpower, however, will be an issue, unlike during my Skitter days I don’t have bug powers to keep a constant vigil over any territory that I take over. Like the rest of the Undersiders back then I will have to have a force of informers as well as enforcers who will assist me in maintaining any taken territory and watching for trouble. Though if the area is small enough I could possibly track things using my antennae, though that would mean that I would have to have them out all the time rather than simply using them as things I can transform into my mask.

Then again, my mask is the reason why we were attacked in the first place, so it might be prudent to create a different identity as to keep off the vigilante’s radar, at least until I can eliminate them as a threat.

Thinking more on my identity situation, a change could actually prevent some future problems as well. Many of my enemies have died after all. Some of which won’t hesitate to come after me now that I’m down here in Hell. Coil, Bakuda, Purity, a good portion of the S9, and then all the capes at the end, from the monster capes to those that I let die under my control, they might all be gunning for me if they haven’t ended up purged.

Or perhaps simply a new look rather than fully changing my identity. I assume many bug demons call themselves some kind of bug related thing so Skitter shouldn’t be too uncommon; otherwise I could just separate my identities. Have a cape identity again and have my civilian identity. Angel Dust did say that we have a true demon form. Perhaps I could figure that out and make use of it for when I’m working with the Merchants.

I finish my shower and get dressed. I exit the bathroom and Skidmark is walking around while on the phone.

“Oh she’s out, hold on lemme put ya on speaker,” Is all he says before pressing a button on the phone. “Okay, you're on speaker.”

“Hey Doll-face how’s it hangin?’”

“Alright.”

“Good good, anywho, so you know that guy who helps find people I was telling you about?”

“I do.”

“Yeah well his name’s Sam Spade, what a loser am I right?”

“Why’s he a loser?” Sherrel asks as she peers over the couch. With my antennae I can hear the sound of Lil’ Mark making adorable baby sounds on the other side of the couch and with my regular ears I can also hear him knocking something hard and wooden against another wooden thing.

“Oh hey Sherrel, well he named himself after the main character in the Maltese Falcon,” we are silent a moment before Angel pipes up again. “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen the Maltese Falcon?” we all exchange glances before we mutter our own denials at having ever seen the Maltese Falcon.

“Oh my god it's like the best noir I’ve ever seen! Tell ya what next time you guys get a break I’m gonna see if I can get one of the theatre managers to have a special showing of it and we can all watch it together.”

“That sounds great, but what about Sam Spade?” I say, attempting to be diplomatic.

“Oh yeah, him. Well he’s a private detective, go figure, that’s got a knack for tracking down people. Anyways, I don’t remember his address but I can hook you up with his phone number and he can give you the details on how ta get to his place. Just so you know though, he costs and an arm and a leg, and I don’t mean that he’s a cannibal.”

“That’s fine, I can ask when I call,” I tell Angel.

“Alright then, his number is,” and Angel proceeds to rattle off a small combination of numbers that I quickly memorise. I’d have to write that down on paper at some point.

“That wasn’t the only reason I called though,” Angel continues. “Val’s fuckin’ pissed. He was rantin’ and ravin’ and all that shit, his smoke flying everywhere, smashing shit against walls and stuff. Hell I think he killed a couple of people that didn’t duck and cover. I got there when he was starting to calm down. After a while he just pulls up a table, chair, and one of the few bottles not broken at the bar, pours himself a drink. Anyways, just wanted to warn you if you guys feel like pissing Val off, hold off for a bit. I’m gonna call Cherri and see if I can’t get her to lay off for a bit... Oh! And before I forget, you know that Bird guy we blasted? I found his corpse and the others still by my apartment. All their shit was gone but I brought ‘em to Val so you shouldn’t have to worry about those guys coming at you again for some time. Alright I’ll talk to you later,” Angel says and hangs up.

I frown at that. While I don’t appreciate them trying to kill me they likely will suffer greatly under Valentino, though I can’t really do anything about him at the moment. Even with my bug powers, judging by the area of effect he was able to manage I likely wouldn’t find them very effective against him, especially if he could use his smoke like tentacles. I would have likely needed to go in hard and fast against him before he could react if I had encountered him in life. Unfortunately I don’t have my flight pack or the other gadgets I had gotten during my time in the Wards.

No, going up against Valentino as I am now is suicide, and while it is unfortunate, their fate is not my problem at the moment. I can perhaps save them later. I need to focus on the here and now however. I pull out Brainiache’s phone and enter Sam Spade’s number into what looked like a notepad app.

“I’m going to call this Sam Spade, see if he can help me,” I say, heading off to the guest room that Sherrel and Adam let me sleep in on my first night in Hell. I close the door behind me softly and open up the phone app on Brainiache’s phone. From there I dial Sam Spade’s number. I wait a few rings until someone on the other end picks up.

“Office of Sam Spade, how can we help you?” a sultry feminine voice asks. Not wasting time, I begin asking my questions.

“Hello, I would like to ask about your services and how much they cost?”

“Of course. Is there any specific service that you wish to know about?”

“I would like to know if you can help me find a friend of mine.”

“Ah, one of those jobs… Honey, are you new in town?”

“Relatively.”

“Oh honey, do you have a job yet?” I don’t like the sounds of this.

“Not yet, but I have one lined up.”

“… I’m not sure you’ll be able to afford him honey,” I wait silently for her to continue. “See he charges eight grand for a week of searching, and sometimes these searches can take a couple of years or more depending on where they ended up in Hell,” oh. I knew that this would cost an arm and a leg but I hadn’t realised how much it would end up costing.

“I see, thank you for your time.”

“I’m sorry honey. I know that this is important. I can ask Sam to maybe lower it for you? Or maybe to work out some kind of compensation or deal that would work for you?”

“No thank you, I have other business I need to deal with. Goodbye,” she beckons me goodbye before I hit the end call button and stuff the phone in my pocket. Eight thousand dollars a week to find Alec. Somehow I would need to get that kind of disposable income each week to find Alec. Seems I will have to go with plan A then. I don’t see myself finding a job that pays eight thousand every week any time soon, and the only way to start making that kind of money is to either start robbing banks every week, or I could work to getting that kind of money by expanding the Merchant’s business and getting them to foot the bill in return for my cut of the money and assistance.

Certainly not ideal, but I can make this work.


	7. Chapter 7

The Skittering Chaos 7

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We are all gathered at Adam and Sherrel’s kitchen table, Adam, Sherrel, Mimi, and the imp man who I’ve since learned is named Felix. The meeting isn’t professional, but then this had been what the Undersiders had done before we had all gone off to be Warlords and started working directly under Coil.

Humble beginnings

That had probably been when things had been the best between all of us, just when everything had been nice and simple, we were thieves, there wasn’t a world to save or territory to defend from everyone, we could just be dumb kids.

Maybe I shouldn’t do this? Things got crazy the last time I started getting into big things. Perhaps it might be better to just live a smaller, simpler life, as just some minor member of, so less a gang and more a small business really. The Merchants held territory, though it was just a single building and the sidewalks around it, and they didn’t even try to stop people from walking on it. In truth, a business was just the same. I could settle down and just live life easy while going out on weekends to try to find Alec.

“Thank you all for coming.” I say, starting the meeting where we could work towards the expansion of the Merchants. All the doubts from before flying from my mind as the meeting around the kitchen table starts. Settling down for an easy life? Not when there is work to be done.

“As myself, Adam, and Sherrel have discussed, it has come to our attention that we are not making as much money as we need to achieve some of our goals,” My goals truth be told, but Adam was all for the expansion of the Merchants, Sherrel was as well but she was more just wanting to support her husband than actually caring about expanding territorially, but she was all for expanding financially as it would allow her better tools to work on her “babies” as well as pamper her lil’ Mark. I wait for the other two, Felix and Mimi, to ask questions, perhaps like what our goals actually were, but they just look on, waiting for me to continue.

“As such, we need to expand both territorially as well as financially. We’ve had a few ideas but I wanted to include you two as well since you two are employees here and it might be a good idea to get some second opinions on how we all move forward?”

“Wait, you joined?” Mimi asks and I nod.

“Working with the Merchants is the quickest way to achieve my goals, but to do that we need both money, territory, and since I don’t have access to my original bug powers, manpower.”

“Well, why do you need anything from us? You took over the Bay, didn’t you have ways of making money.” The corner of my mouth twitches down a bit. Despite being able to handle the finances I was given, I wasn’t the main money maker. The money maker of the Undersiders was Lisa who had handled all of that, we just organised our territory while Lisa gave us the money we needed to keep everything running. I probably should have at least tried to help out with that, but with all the threats around the city as well as managing my own territory’s recovery with the money I got, I just left it to Lisa to figure out how to get us our money without depleting our new found riches.

“I did yes but we also wanted to hear from you two as well. Adam, you know some of the formulas of various drugs.” Adam grins at that, looking much too pleased with himself.

“Yup, I was sheeeoot at all my other classes, but I knew chemistry, well, the lab stuff that is, it’s like baking and I knew how to bake and… stuff since my mamma taught me. She was like, Son, I’z let chu do what you want, but by god I ain’t gonna have you eatin’ that Mahc-Dah-nahls sheit- gah!” Adam’s impression of his mother is cut off as I feel Sherrel’s leg woosh by my own legs and kick Adam hard in the shin. He doubles over and is grabbing his shin in pain as the others look with amusement. Mark, who was in Sherrel’s arms bouncing happily on Sherrel’s lap, giggles and claps as he watches his father’s pain. I wait until the giggling of both lil’ Mark and Mimi subside before continuing with the meeting.

“As I was saying, Adam will be increasing his drug production so that we can possibly increase the amount we are selling to Vended Generics as well as to those that are willing customers.” It rankles my sensibilities to be selling drugs but with the extreme proliferation of them throughout Pentagram city I can’t do like I had in my old territory in Brockton Bay and just ban the dealing of them. Not to mention that things like prohibition, something I had learned about during the classes I took while in the Wards, only really increased demand for the substance. In fact it actually made the business more lucrative and thus more enticing to get into. With it legalised however, making drugs is more like running some kind of green house or a back alley drug store. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to let people ruin their lives before they realise they had fucked up. So long as they don’t start forcing it on people or taking advantage of their buyers, I’d have to begrudgingly accept the fact that drugs are a part of life here in Hell.

“Sherrel here will look into offering custom body work, mostly pertaining to adding gun turrets and armour to light vehicles.” Sherrel had gushed at the idea of the technicals when I had gone into details on them. She was even happier when I told her how lucrative selling technicals in a lawless gangland like Pentagram city could be. I remember drawing out one from memory, where some African warlord had sent out a force of them to fight with another warlord. It had been a simple thing, just a truck with a machine gun mounted on the back, and immediately Sherrel had looked it over before making some modifications. She even started making her own rough technical drawings for various kinds of vehicles, like a van version, and even some kind of battle bus with turrets and other small arms strong points scattered around on it. While you could take the power from the Tinker, you couldn’t take the Tinker from the person. I’d left Sherrel to her own devices while I watched over lil’ Mark and experimented some more with my silk. If I could get this down I could finally get some clothes that weren’t a set of booty shorts and a t-shirt, as well as possibly create an additional source of revenue for ourselves that isn't tied to drugs.

“I myself will be working on improving my abilities with my silk production as well as help handle the expansion of our territory into the surrounding neighbourhoods. For that I however will likely need to learn more magic.” I look first at Mimi, and then to Felix before asking. “Do either of you happen to have any sort of magical abilities that you could teach me?” The both of them shake their heads, with my antennae though, I hear Mimi swallow. I look back to her, but Felix speaks up before I can stare at her too long.

“I don’t know nothing but my Dad might, he works on the outskirts for some gang. Mostly newbie and immigrant slaving and all that, not super magic heavy, but he might have picked up a thing or two.” I frown at that. Slavery. Not exactly surprising. Even in America there was plenty of slavery going on. From the ABB to Accord’s organisation, it wasn’t uncommon to find slavery and human trafficking rings operating in cities all over America and other countries. Considering that one of the main ways that the ABB made money in Brockton Bay was through human trafficking, both through sneaking illegal immigrants into America to exporting slaves to Asian markets to be enslaved, I’m surprised that a slavery ring hadn’t shown up in Brockton Bay where the rich and powerful were engaging in slavery to satisfy their perverse desires. The PRT and local police were certainly corrupt enough to have overlooked such a thing.

“If you could that would be a great help to us. Now, to jump start this expansion, I believe that we should take a page out of the books of our raider and vigilante friends, and see about raiding them, and getting a hold of whatever short term gains we can while we prepare to expand.” Striking back at those that had attacked us being a possible bonus if we can find out what groups Snipes had brought together to attack us.

When I had tried to find out through Brainiache’s phone I soon found myself kicked from the group chat they had set up, but I had noted a couple of names. Those being Aerial Ace, and Bigman. I’m guessing those were their cape names in life, and they had picked those as their demonic nicknames. There had been one last message by Snipes about how I may have Brainiaches phone, which I do, and then I had been kicked from the group chat.

“Do you know where they are?” Sherrel asks. We had mostly gone over the economic aspects of what she could do, that and I hadn’t had the time to go through the various things on the phone, or even properly figure it out. All of my previous phones had been simple burner or flip phones. Dragon had gotten me a Dragon Phone one time and I had tried using it briefly, but it just eventually started collecting dust in my room as I continued to use the phones that the PRT provided since I didn’t want to damage it. Dragon never said anything but I noticed she had one of her mechanical suits turn its head slightly when I had been using the PRT provided phone. I’m not sure if she was disappointed or not, though she probably understood why I hadn’t been using her phone.

“I don’t know where they are specifically, but I do know a few places where they have been, just by the pictures and the uncleared search history.” Brainiache had been rather lax with even the most basic of information concealment on his phone. Granted I was as well but that was because if I even attempted to hide anything I searched I would more than likely get my computer access revoked due to my probationary status in the wards.

“So were we need to go?” Adam asks, having finally recovered from the shin kick.

“A small bar named ‘The Scrap Hole.’ It’s on the south side of Pentagram city. Brainiache and Snipes, the one that we killed and his girlfriend who you taunted, took a picture in front of the place.” I pull up the picture of the place on Brainiache’s phone, showing the two of them, Snipes looking up at the sign while Brainiache posed for a selfie, two feather-like fingers throwing the peace sign. I’d found the information of where it was already searched up in some kind of map app. The bar itself looks like a junk heap with scrap steel bolted haphazardly over the windows and the sign was a mishmash of different neon signs spelling out ‘The Scrap Hole.’ It looks like the buildings beside it have metal in place of windows rather than the usual wooden coverings. There is also a heavy haze in the air, like the place or somewhere near it was on fire. Considering that it’s Hell, there probably is a fire raging somewhere close.

“So we's gonna go an f… uh get them buggers right?” Adam asks but I shake my head.

“Not yet, we’re not prepared to go in there yet. I don’t even have a gun since I dropped them after Snipes knocked me out.” Mimi looks to my head where the bruise used to be. It had cleared up before supper time but it was still visible enough for Mimi to have seen when they had gotten back yesterday. “No we need to gather some information first. They gave away their intentions but they likely don’t even know the first thing about us. That gives us time to scout them out and figure out the best way to hurt them.”

“So what are you doing at the bar then?” Sherrel asks, her head tilting to the side a bit.

“They only ever saw me with my costume, so they likely don’t know what I look like outside of costume. Out of costume I can go in and ask around for information about the vigilantes, maybe get an idea if they frequent the bar. If they do, then it will be easier to get information on where their base of operations is and where to hit them so that it really hurts.” I explain my plan to them. None of them objected to the idea and Adam was nodding along. Though, I doubt they would be so willing to accept my idea if they knew my record for infiltration missions, that record consisting of one mission to infiltrate a villain group and ending up being converted into one of them. This doesn’t have the risk of me being converted however, considering that they are mostly after my blood.

“So when are we doing this?” Sherrel asks.

“After I test out a few things with my magic. I don’t want to go in there with just a pistol, but I also got my senses screwed up when Adam fired his gun, so I want to see if I can’t silence it a bit.”

“How you gonna do that? I know you can make my barriers and stuff for some reason but that’s just what I do. I don’t even know how to make them quiet and stuff.” Adam remarks, and I resist frowning for a moment. They will have to learn about my final moments at some point, and Adam already knows something was up considering Snipes’ ranting about mind control. I sigh before beginning.

“As you can probably guess, the apocalypse fired off up stairs, killing billions, possibly trillions of people across multiple worlds. I along with some people tried to stop it.”

“Some?” Mimi asks, her face concerned. “Don’t you mean all?”

“No, I don’t mean all.”

“But wouldn’t the end of the world, heck, all worlds, get everyone to work together, even just to save themselves?” I look to her with sympathy.

“You would think, but not everyone thought that way.” I think back to all the fighting, all the people who wanted to get their revenge before the end, the people who were trying to take as much as they could before everything fell apart, all the petty squabbles that no one could put aside just this once to fight the good fight.

“But that doesn’t make any sense. If everyone is going to die, why wouldn’t everyone want to work together? Even the nine would work together to stop the apocalypse, even if just to save their own skin!” I let out a one note chuckle.

“Jack and his band were the ones that started the apocalypse. They wanted it, and they got it. Not that any of them survived long enough to really see it.”

“So they’re down here?” I can’t identify the emotion in Mimi’s voice, it could be fear, or apprehension.

“All except Jack and Bonesaw,” I pause a second. “Actually I don’t know about Bonesaw, she was the only one that actually helped us when everything started going down.” Mimi is silent for a long moment.

“Did, did you win?” Mimi asks in a small voice. “Or… or is it still going on up there?”

“We won.” I say. I don’t elaborate further. We had won, humanity was saved. Some would say that was all that mattered. I know better, but I don’t say it. Those words had been for Contessa as I had been slowly dying, or losing myself, nearing oblivion. I do believe them, but there’s no reason to antagonise Mimi.

“Oh thank God,” Mimi breathes a sigh of relief, then looks up at me with curiosity in her eyes. “How did you win?” I grimace at the memory. That was not something I would like to experience again if I can help it. As I’m about to say how however, Felix interrupts.

“Wait who were you fighting up there?”

“Yeah that’s a good question, who was it, and why couldn’t Scion fight against whoever it was?” Sherrel asks.

“The reason that Scion wasn’t fighting with us was because Jack said or did something, that made Scion go ballistic. He started destroying and killing people for fun, destroying entire cities, annihilating entire worlds for his own amusement.” Mimi, Sherrel, and Adam all had shocked looks on their faces, Felix was indifferent however, but he listens raptly as I talk.

“At first there was a large meeting by anyone relevant to try to come together and fight him, but everything broke down and nearly everyone broke off and started fighting their own little battles against each other, to get some final bit of satisfaction before the end. Myself and a few others however stayed together to try to stop Scion and were running around trying to figure something out and keep things together. It wasn’t enough however. At the end, I had both Bonesaw and Panacea alter my connection to my power, to make it more powerful. I was able to take control of people at the end there. I, with the help of a cape named Clairvoyant and Doormaker started to mind control every cape we could find and fought against Scion… in the end there, I wasn’t there, I wasn’t the one in control. It was my power, who was in control of me, but we were both working towards the same goal, we were slowly becoming one in the same there. We did eventually beat Scion, and in the end I was scared of what was happening to me, so in my final moments, I let myself get executed.”

“That’s, that’s not right.” Mimi says after I finish my story.

“It’s al-”

“No it isn’t alright!” She interrupts me, slamming her hands on the table. I wait to let her continue what she is going to say, better to let her say her piece than to try to talk over her. “It’s not right. You saved everyone, and they just killed you! They, it, it isn’t how the world should be!” I sympathise with her, I really do.

“The world isn’t fair,” is all I say. There isn’t any point arguing about how the world should or shouldn’t be. The world just is, and despite our best efforts, life isn’t fair, just like how the afterlife isn’t fair either. She deflates after I say that. Her hands are in fists and her hair shadows her eyes. With my antennae I can feel a bit of magic stirring in her. I can kind of make out what is going on before she takes a deep breath and lets go of her anger. I wonder what that was? Perhaps her demonic form? Perhaps I can mimic that in some way?

“It isn’t how it should be… it should be that the heroes after a hard fight come out on top, they win the day and beat the bad guy… kill him, jail him, whatever, they just are supposed to beat him, and then they get to have their happy ending…” I let a soft smile spread on my lips. I walk around the table and put both my hands on Mimi’s shoulders, trying to sooth her by massaging her shoulders. Her naiveté reminds me of how I used to be, back at the start of my cape career. Back when everything was so clear and black and white. The villains were the bad guys, heroes were the good guys, Scion was the world’s greatest hero, and the Endbringers were the ultimate evil. Unfortunately the world wasn’t like that, there was no white or black, only shades of grey, some darker than others.

“I know it isn’t fair. But that’s just how things are. They are never fair, and they never will be. We just have to make the best of it and try to make the best decisions we can at the time. Just like we are doing now,” I’m not sure why I included that last parts. Maybe I’m trying to convince myself that I did the best I could with what I knew. Sure I could say that I could have made better decisions, maybe some things I did were stupid and idiotic, but that was the problem with hindsight, it’s always twenty-twenty. I let go of Mimi’s shoulders and walk back to my spot between Sherrel and Adam.

“Anyways, as I was trying to say, because of how I was mind controlling everyone, I got to see how other people used their power and so far I have been doing that to figure out magic. It’s how I was able to pick up how to use your barriers, it’s relatively similar to the barriers that some other capes would put down. I never had time to practice much with them however so I’m still figuring things out. Once I figure out how to make your barriers silence things as well as accelerate them, I’ll teach you how to alter your barriers. Then I should be good to check out what is going on there.” I tell Adam.

“Yeah, sure thing, makes sense. Is that all ‘cause I gotta make a call to my supplier, he was supposed ta send a shipment to me today and I ain’t got sheeeoot.”

“That is it, unless either of you have any bright ideas on how to increase our revenue?” I ask Mini and Felix.

“I know how to make pipe guns.” I raise an eyebrow at that. Makeshift guns, generally made with pipes or other kinds of cylindrical things, are generally speaking pretty terrible. I had come across a few of them while in Chicago. They weren’t so common there but every once in a while we could come across them. Sometimes in Brockton you would hear about how some Merchant had blown his hand off using a homemade gun out of parts he found in the trash. Most of the time they are unrifled and more used to just get a kill up close or used like a shot gun and firing off a spread of random debris. In fact, the demon with the scrap armour kind of looked like he was using one of those kinds of scrap blunderbusses.

“If we can’t get many guns we could certainly use them to have our people, when we get them, use them to get a first kill and steal a gun. It would lower our initial hiring cost.”

“We could use that sheeeeoooot for initiation. Have a newbie go out and pop off a guy for his gun and stuff.” I frown at that. It was a good idea from a purely financial point of view, but that could cause a large amount of problems for us, as well as gain us too many enemies. Plus it would just make Hell worse rather than better.

“Maybe, but I was thinking that they can bring their own gun. They get to care for their own and use the money from jobs and helping out to pay for their gun. If they don’t have a gun then we make and give them the pipe gun, but other than that, for now whoever wants to join just brings their own.”

“So I guess you’re gonna need a pipe gun then?” Adam asks.

“Maybe, it depends on how much you pay me for the protection I provided you yesterday.” I answer in return. Hopefully it’s enough to get a gun and a few bullets. I might be able to make do without a gun, but without my bug powers, I’ll likely need an edge if I’m going to survive long enough to learn enough magic that I won’t need one. Or I could make a worse version of Adam’s baseball gun.

“Yeah, sure, you did good. Hows about I buy you a gun and a box o' bullets for your first payment. Sound cool?” I nod along with that. That was at least reasonable, and probably at the very least more than minimum wage, but then I don’t actually know minimum wage.

“’kay, cool. Tell you what, when the guy eventually tells me to come and get the chems and stuff then we can take you out to get a gun and stuff. ‘specially if you is gonna come out on our runs with us more.”

“I will, I just won’t go out wearing my old costume again. That draws too much heat.”

“Shame too, you looked good in it. Better in your old costume but your costumes always looked good,” Sherrel remarks.

“Yeah, where did you get it done?” Mimi joins in as well.

“I made them on my own. It took a long time to finally get all of my bugs to play nice and it took even longer for me to figure out how to weave my suit.”

“Damn girl, how long did it take for you to make your suit?”

“Since I triggered, it took me four months until I finally went out on my first night.”

“Damn. I don’t think I could of ever waited that long to use may powers.” There were nods around the table, even by Mimi, though Felix didn’t nod along.

“Well that is everything I wanted to talk about, if no one has anything more to add, then we can all get back to work then.” Felix, Adam, and Mimi get up, Felix and Mimi head back down to the warehouse floor to continue their work, while Adam just walks off with his phone in hand dialling a number.

“Oh hey Skitty? Would you be able to watch over Mark? I need to work on the van a bit but Mark’s been fussy, you didn’t need to do anything right?” While I was planning on experimenting with some of my magics, mostly Adam’s barriers and my own silk, neither was really prevented by me looking after lil’ Mark.

“I can, but why me?” I’m sure that if Sherrel knew my past with children, she wouldn’t be so eager to let me watch lil’ Mark. As I’m looking at Mark, I almost see Aster, in the hands of Grey Boy. I knew it wasn’t them but like with the loft, I sometimes remember things and they simply overlay themselves over reality. When Mom died, I was seeing her for a week on other women, and I would have to do a double take and properly see them to confirm that Mom hadn’t come back from the dead. The same had happened with Regent, only I knew what was going on, so I wasn’t so extreme in my double checking. I would just see them in the corners of my eyes.

“Well I heard how you handled yourself in that gunfight, watching out for my Skiddy so I thought you could help me out while I work on upgrading the van. Plus, if I’m going to be becoming a working woman, I’ll need a babysitter.”

“What about Mimi?”

“We already pay her to help us make drugs and stuff, and we don’t exactly have a lot of employees. Plus, we can consider this you pitching in. At least until we get the gang thing going properly.”

“Alright then,” I don’t comment that whenever she would have an idea about modifying the van or making technicals she would rush off and I would just keep an eye on lil’ Mark for her. Usually she came back quick but when I first gave her ideas for the technicals she had spent a good half an hour drawing out rough plans.

“Great!” Sherrel gets up, with lil’ Mark in her arms and holds him out to me. As gently as I can, I use my arms to hold him.

“He has some toys in the living room, and if he starts getting hungry you can just call me up… Do you know how to change a diaper?” I remember back to a training course on babysitting that I had attended one year. I had never gotten to use my babysitting license since the only people I really knew were friends of Dad’s and the Barnes. With the work shortages in the Docks, most dockworkers had enough time for at least one parent to watch their kid during the day while the other worked whatever odd job Dad had been able to scrounge up for them. Because of that I never really got to do any babysitting, but I still remember some of the things we had to do, one of them being diaper a baby doll, one of those dolls that “really did poop.”

“I know how to, yes,”

“Okay great, We have the diapers in the top drawer of the dresser if my little Mark makes a stinky,” Sherrel grabs lil’ Mark’s nose and wiggles it a bit, much to lil’ Mark’s amusement as he giggles a bit at his mother’s antics.

“Alright, I’m going downstairs so just watch over him a bit until I get back.” I watch as Sherrel heads downstairs. As Sherrel heads down lil’ Mark starts squirming and getting antsy in my arms, One of his arms is reaching out towards Sherrel and he starts letting out a wordless cry of longing as she heads downstairs. I start shushing him as I make my way into the living room.

“Shh shh it’s okay Mark, let's get you some blocks to play with.”

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With a “shunk,” a wooden block flies from my acceleration field into a tower of blocks I had set up for Mark. With a crash the tower falls down and Mark lets out excited giggles and gurgles as he claps at the tower’s destruction. Had it not been plastered on my face for the past little while, I would have started smiling. Mark was a little devil and was easily distracted by destruction and cacophonous noises, especially if he could make them himself. I’d set up the field to entertain Mark while I tested some other kinds of fields with small balls of silk I made.

I had managed to make a silencing field that also accelerates, but when I replaced Mark’s acceleration field he started to become distressed at how there wasn’t a “shunk” to go along with the sound of blocks falling. I hadn’t figured out how to do much more than a kind of shield and how to silence objects going through them. When I had a chance I should see about putting some fields down in a gun to see if my silencing-acceleration fields actually works well enough to keep a modified gun from stunning me while I have my enhanced senses up.

Other than that I had also been able to figure out some of my silk. I haven’t been able to do anything really with it. While I was good at getting insects to weave my suits, actually weaving them was a completely different matter, especially since I both didn’t have any of the tools to weave any of the silk I made, nor had I ever weaved or knit anything in my life without just using insects. Mom had never felt the need to teach me and Grandma, who I heard was also a fairly good knitter, didn’t care for Dad or me so I never actually got to meet them.

So I just made balls of silk to use as slight objects to test the fields on, as well as sometimes ammunition for Mark to use in his war against all wooden block towers and structures. They weren’t as satisfying for him to launch however, as they didn’t make as loud a noise as when he uses wooden blocks to fire them off at the towers.

While Mark giggles and gurgles in his adorable little childish way, I hear something buzzing around inside of the room with my antennae. I look towards the source and see something flying around. It’s a bit larger than the regular bug, and is a deep red colour as well. The colour is probably to better blend in with the environment outside. I watch as it starts to come closer. I slowly raise my finger to the bug. Long had my fear of insects been dulled to the point that I didn’t even find them even a little unsettling. They just act on instinct. Eat, breed, flee. They come rather predictable in a sense. I can see the needle like nose as it starts to come closer, smelling it’s meal perhaps? It lands on my finger, and angles its long beak like nose towards my hand.

I remember many of the master powers that had been under my control back during the end fighting Scion. One that felt most like the magic I wield now was a human controlling power, where the cape pushed energy into a person and focused on the person. Using the same principles, I focus on the bug, and push my energy into it, willing myself to take control over it, to control it like I used to control my insects back when I was alive.

The beak like head of the insect dives for my hand, and it stops. I can see, in its beady little eyes, a small mote of light, as if deep in its eyes, was a small candle light. By my will it moves its head back, and it faces towards me.

I grin.


	8. Interlude: Various

The Skittering Chaos Interlude: Various

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Me, Skitter and Mimi walk into the gun store and are greeted by racks of weapons, some big, some small. Hell, I can see a rocket launcher behind the counter there. This place has everything and that’s why I like it.

“Frederico, my man, how the hell are ya doing!?” I call out to the guy who I’ve been buying my guns from since I first arrived here in Hell. The massive elephant like demon brightens up as he sees me.

“Hey hey hey! Adam, you here to do another gun run for me?” Ah shit, like Hell! I remember a while ago when I agreed to come with him on one of his gun runs. Granted I was happy to help, and get a little bit of a discount for helping him, but that thing was a shit show. Run a bunch of guns over to New Canada and make sure they get to the rebels there. Shit was fucked the whole way there. Giant fuck off worms, bandit, feral demon tribes, demon bug hives, and even a fucking crusade with armoured knights and everything going on. Makes me wish that we had been using the tank rather than the van but we didn’t get it until we got the warehouse. Still, gave us the boost of cash we needed to start the new Merchants.

“Nah nigga! I nearly got eaten by a fucking worm! We ain’t even thinking of going out again until we get a better damn ride,” Frederico chuckles at my expense. He’s a bastard but got the damn charisma to keep me coming back, I just am never going to accept a job from him ever again unless I want to be eaten by fucking land krakens. Plus that discount is pretty sweet whenever I need to stock up on ammo for the fire fights around the city.

“Next time then my friend, though I haven’t seen you in a while. Have you been seeing another gun store!?” he says and levels a finger towards me.

“What me? Nah, my girl knows her way around a pile a scrap and shit. Hooked me up with a baseball launcher that I been using with my magic and shit. Literally blows fucking heads off my dude.”

“Ah then, I guess that poor old Frederico can no more get your business then huh? This is a sad day my friend a sad day! How could you do this to me?” He says this while clutching his heart and making a pained expression.

“I wish, nah, I came here ‘cause I need to get mo’ ammo. You know that big ass gun fight that was going on in Val’s place?” That got him to straighten up.

“With the vigilantes? Don’t tell me you were in that? That shit looked as crazy as the battle of Wofla.”

“I was man, I was. You said it, shit was crazy, but we came through, partially ‘cause of this girl here.” I reach over and pull Skitter close. “Girl blasted a load of ‘em and we managed ta get outta there ‘cause a her.” Frederico reaches over the counter and sticks out a massive hand out for Skitter to shake.

“Well, let me be the first to congratulate you on your well fought victory my lady. It’s not often that I meet a woman such as you, even here, if his stories are to be believed that is. Is he lying to me or did you actually manage to help this poor desgracado out?”

“I did a bit to help get us out of there.”

“Ha! So modest, you remind me of all those tales where navigators or explorers would discover that one of their best men was actually a woman! Only without all the disguises and finding out and stuff. Haha. So, how can I help you three?”

“I’m just looking.” Mimi says beside us, looking at some of the shooting range clothes that Frederico had out, mostly outdoor hunting stuff, mostly in red camo, since we are in hell and every damn thing is red.

“I didn’t have my launcher so I was using ma gun, an I’m startin’ to run low ‘n’ sheit.” Frederico snorts at that and his shoulders shake a bit in amusement at me.

“Let me guess, you were shooting like a dumb ass right?” He then makes a finger gun and starts pointing it side ways, making some low effort gun sounds.

“Ha, fuck you man I was shooting straight. There was just a fuck ton of ‘em and I couldn’t see for shit. Smoke and dust and shit was everywhere.” Frederico stops with his teasing and nods along.

“That sounds about right, from all the smoke I saw on the news, I bet half of the bandidos were using black powder rounds. So what about you miss? Looking to defend yourself? Or deal some damage?”

“Both preferably, do you have a pistol that fires forty five auto for under a thousand?”

“Straight to business then. Yeah, I got about a dozen different kinds of them on hand that are less than a thousand. Got a bunch of ten millimetre too, cheap to if you like you’re guns oversized and looking like the bastard child of a desert eagle and a block of steel.”

“I think I’ll stick with the forty fives. I’m more familiar with them than the ten millimetres.” Frederico shrugs as he grabs a small binder that shows the various pistols that he’s got.

“Alright, so here is what I got. I have it all sorted cheapest to most expensive so you can buy on your budget. I know most people these days like to sort on that on that internet thing.” He thumbs one of the tabs sticking out of the side and opens it up to the forty five auto pistols. “You can check the other guns if you want as well. Like I said, the ten millimetre are pretty popular among some people, same with nine millimetre. But that one will only get you so far if you’re trying to bring down a big mean demon on your ass, or some of the other bad shit out there.”

“I’ll make sure to keep that in mind, thank you.”

“Enjoy yourself miss.” Frederico says before turning to me.

“So you do need bullets from me then? Good. I just machined a fresh batch, did you want the smokeless or the black powder ones? Oh, and what gun did you use?”

“What else homie? I used my glock!”

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Skitter had grabbed a hold of a classic, a M1911. Replica of course, made with the black metal you can get in hell. Still looks fine as Hell. Frederico let us use the shooting range he got for a bit less than usual, curtsey of my discount of course. Skitter mostly wanted to test out her gun, check the sights and all that. Mimi didn’t want to, instead she just asked for something to muffle gun shots and pulled out one of her comic books. Girl’s damn well obsessed with them.

She checks the gun over first. Once more she reminds me of those veterans that ended up with us in the old Merchants gang. Always checking over their guns, always cleaning them. Skitter’s got that kind of movement to her.

I watch Skitter load a mag in faster than I’ve seen anyone but professional soldiers, or Frederico, do, sight the target down range, and let out five shots. Three of the bullets enter into the chest and two bullets into the head of the target. None of them miss their mark.

“Damn girl you scary… Makes me wonder why you never had a gun.” I tell her. She doesn’t look away from the target as she just stares ahead. Like usual I suppress a frown at her. Girl’s so damn uptight, back in the bad ol’ days Big Daddy would have tied a uptight bitch like her down and would of fucked the bitch out of her, or until she bit her tongue. I remember having to watch that. Some tough chick, tough as nails and ugly as sin. Started working with us, she could take orders, but she never fucking calmed down, pissed off Big Daddy more than us, we never really gave a shit.

I still remember the screaming… Daddy didn’t even care about it. Was just him “loosening up a bitch.” She wasn’t the same after… then again… none of us were the same after Daddy came into our lives.

“What changed?”

“Wha?”

“What changed?” She asks.

“What you mean?”

“You, Sherrel, the Merchants. You were all runts.” I can’t help my brow scrunching a bit as she says that, was that an insult or? “I don’t mean it in a derogatory way, but rather in a more literal sense. Always scraping with the big dogs, always fighting for every single scrap, never caring at all who got in your way. You never had a bit of self preservation in mind when you started fighting everyone, no plan, nothing, just thinking in the now and fighting for every scrap you could get, tearing down everyone on the way to eat your next meal… a force of destruction and anarchy.” I don’t know what to say to that so I just let the girl talk.

“Now I come across you and you’re saving people on the streets, helping the poor, giving them jobs… you’ve built a business, and despite how some people may see it by selling drugs, you’re contributing to society here. So what changed? What changed you Skidmark? What changed the man that would have revelled in this anarchy and chaos and made you into an honest man?” Ah, shit, that. I pull out a small joint I had, and lit the end with a little fire magic that Mimi had shown me. I take a long drag, feel it in my lungs, and finally exhale.

“Shock… I guess.”

“Shock?”

“Yeah… shock. Like one moment we were having the party of our lives. Then the next moment, none of it mattered. Nothin’ that I did mattered after I died and ended up here… Ya know, I’ve been fighting my entire life you know? From fucking birth to right now. I’ve been fighting, scraping, surviving, all that shit. At some point it became sort of a habit. Wake up, get dressed, figure out what you lost in the night, figure out how to get it back, or how to get even and shit. Just habit. Eventually when we went big, we just kept going. Kept fighting, kept surviving, even after all that shit. Fight, survive, celebrate that you ain’t dead yet. How it was. No body gave a shit ‘bout us.

Then Levi hit. Suddenly there was a fuck ton a people just like us. Joined up with us. We were golden, damn well platinum. We were the strongest gang in Brockton and we could do what ever the fuck we wanted. You wanna know how I felt? What I felt at that moment when the Merchants were top of the world?” Skitter is silent as I look at her. Her expression never changed. If it weren’t for her big eyes it would almost look like she didn’t care, or she was waiting for me to properly answer, but with them it almost looks like she’s looking at me with puppy dog eyes. I know she ain’t, but the impression is still there.

“Nothing. Not a God damn thing. All that shit was the same thing, different day. None of it mattered. Just going through the motions. Kind of like I said. ‘Sall just habit. I know I should of felt something. I just didn’t know what. I’d look at how my guys were taking over, grabbing more territory than we ever had. And I’d just nod along as they talk to me. Telling me about what we were doing.”

“I had a similar feeling in the Wards. I didn’t realise it then but I could have been doing something else that either made more of a difference or just spent it with my friends.”

“Not when you were the big bad warlord?” I ask, a wry grin gracing my face as I watch Skitter turn to the targets once more. She hits the button on the side of the shooting range and a large number of targets start to pop up at random.

“When I was in the Undersiders, at least I was with my friends. We were making a difference in the city. For some we were the new gang that was keeping people down and bringing crime to the city. For so many more however, we were saviours. Then I gave it all up to try to stop the end of the world.” While she talks she’s popping off shots, bulls eye, bulls eye, bulls eye. Her aim never wavers as she continues to hit targets, more like a tinker tech robot made for shooting than a person… or that one Canadian guy that we ran with. Wonder what ever happened to him?

“Well ya did.” Skitter looks over at me for a second while reloading her mag, after loading it, I watch as despite looking away she is still aiming for the next target, she squeezes the trigger. Bulls eye.

“We did. But we didn’t prevent it. That was the whole point of joining the Wards. Prevent the apocalypse. Turned out that all that time in the Wards, all that training. We dealt with a lot of bad things, fought Endbringers. But none of it stopped the apocalypse. None of the things I did in the Wards couldn’t have been done outside of them as an independent.” Skitter empties her mag at the targets, reloads, and holsters it. I look at the targets, already knowing what I’ll see. Bulls eyes. Seems Skitter’s happy with the gun I got her. We walk out, and Mimi is just where we left her, reading her comic book. I see a bug go by Mimi’s view, hover there, before coming back to us and Mimi follows the bugs until shes looking up at us. Seems Skitty got her power back.

“Up until I learned more about the heroes, I had wanted to be one. I would dress up as heroes with my once sister. It wasn’t until I learned more that I stopped wanting to be a hero. Then… there I was, a hero. I did good work as one, and I don’t regret the good I did. But the entire time, I was being blocked from doing much of anything meaningful. It took me years trying to get the momentum I needed to actually properly get things rolling in a ways where I could try to change things for the better. Those changes however, might have been easier if I had been outside of the system. At some point, all the stuff I had been dealing with, everything I had sacrificed, all of it, it had stopped being worth it, but by then I had already been committed, and the dead line for the end of the world was coming up fast. Even if I had wanted to get out and try again, it would be too late. So I stayed, because after everything I had gone through, it had to have been for something.” Mimi and I are silent as we continue along with Skitter, walking out of the gun store.

“Was it something?” Mimi asks. I’m about to ask what she means but Skitter seems to get it. She glances over to Mimi before nodding.

“It was, but not enough to be worth it. I didn’t do enough, didn’t get enough done. Some of it was because whenever I wasn’t attending to Ward duties, I was confined to my cell or the base where I would do research and make sure I didn’t get lazy. Whenever I was actually making a move to something positive, the Protectorate leadership or PRT would block me off, and keep things from getting done.” Skitter shrugs.

“Part of it was prejudice, some of it was because I was making waves, disrupting people’s nice little system. I was riling up the status quo, and people didn’t like it, so they tried to stop me. Some people didn’t like what I was doing to the Wards so they would look into stopping me there, others would just show disdain. Lots of heroes just avoided me because they knew that the leadership didn’t like me, so they choose that they would rather keep their career secure rather than associate with me or my ideas.” We were silent for a while. It sounds like the hero shit was a bunch of bullshit. But then Skitter had been a warlord and took over Brockton. Can’t have been good for the shit heads on top to have got shown up time and time again by a gang of brats. Wonder how Skitter managed to avoid the cage for that though?

“You know… I always wanted to be a hero.” Mimi says, staring off in the distance, the way she always does when she reminisces. I can sometimes see the horror in her eyes when she’s remembering things. Makes me wonder what she has experienced to give her such a face like that. But she doesn’t like to talk about it, so I keep my distance. She’s a good Merchant, even if she won’t fight for shit. “I’d look at all their pretty costumes, all the TV shows. I’d read all their comics and dream I was a hero. I’d fight the bad guys in my mind while I read their comics and played with their action figures. I’d imagine what my costume would look like, and I would just dream of being something I’m not. Though… the way that you talk about it… and… what they did to you after… I’m not sure I want to be a hero anymore.”

“It wasn’t actually the Protectorate that killed me in the end. It was a cape named Contessa. She’d been behind the scenes in nearly everything. After the end, she came for me, pulled me to another world, and talked to me for a bit. I wasn’t sure what was happening to me, but because of the alteration to my power, I wasn’t really me. Yet Contessa managed to talk to me. She was the one who killed me. I think it might have been a mercy killing, but I can’t be sure. I just know that I let it happen.”

“Why?” Skitter doesn’t answer. She, like Mimi, looks out as she reminisces. Unlike Mimi however, her face didn’t change into one of fear, or horror. Instead she just contemplates. She doesn’t answer.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“Fear.”

“Fear? What the hell was you scared of? You the warlord o Brockton! An’ you just killed Scion. Couldn’t ya just go back and get ya mind unfucked by Panpan?”

“I wasn’t in control, not really. That’s what I was scared of.”

“You were being mastered?”

“In a sense…”

“Shit man…”

“As for the Protectorate, I don’t know. They are, or rather were necessary. They were also reforming things from how they were, or at least trying. I paid attention when I could. Unfortunately, without the PRT playing ball, most of the time the reforms they were trying did nothing or were put on the back burner, as well as there was an attempt to get capes to clean up their acts. I don’t know how well it went though. I was about to find out myself before the apocalypse hit. If you had joined the cape scene, I think it might have been best to join them, or some other hero team. You could make a difference in the world and help people, save some lives, and make sure not so many people die. Don’t get me wrong, for all the faults of the Protectorate, at this point, after so long, they had made themselves necessary. Not to mention that they were one of the major organisers of the Endbringer fights. Without them, I don’t think we would be doing so well.” Skitter finishes her musing on the Protectorate for Mimi. She doesn’t look like she’s convinced though.

We just walk for a bit in silence again. Heavy shit like dying and all that shit was a damn mood kill, but then, the mood was already dead. Still. Control, makes sense. Masters are a bunch a mother fuckers like that. I don’t need the god damned PRT boys to tell me that. All that mind shit is freaky as hell and I made sure I ain’t never got involved with capes that did that shit. Not just too much heat, but also you never knew if they were going to try something on you. More than a few human masters had thought about joining the Merchants back in the day. Daddy let them, but after I took charge, I told them to fuck off. Usually with a dozen or so guys with guns, and a dozen more out of sight to take him down just in case.

“Hey,” Mimi speaks up and draws our attention. We’re by a clothing store. The place doesn’t look like it’s even been affected by the bullshit that other parts of the city have been dealing with. “Do you even have any of your own clothes Skitty?”

“Not really. I’ve been getting by with just Squealer’s spares. I haven’t exactly had time to get clothes before now.” Aw crap, clothes shopping. We’re going to be here for hours.

“Well why don’t we go in here then, maybe even find some more stores, come on, we can make a day out of this right? Not everything has to be about work.”

“When have I ever said that everything has to be about work?” Mimi rolls her eyes in an exaggerated fashion.

“Come on Skitty, You’ve been here what, three days? All you’ve done is work, and from what you told me, all you’ve done for the past two years is just work. You need some time off!”

“I had some time off less than two years ago.”

“Oh really? When was that?” Mimi had crossed her arms and moves in front of us, her eyebrow raised.

“My birthday, right before everything started happening. I got to be with the Undersiders for a bit. It was nice for a while.”

“And that was?”

“A little more than a week ago. I don’t quite remember how long we were fighting Scion for. I think it was maybe four days, but I’m not quite sure, everything was happening so fast. But I had a bit of time off.”

“Not enough! Come on, just one more day before you go back to working on the next problem?”

“I wasn’t planning on trying anything today. Yesterday proved that I was woefully under equipped to even deal with some of the things we will face going forward with my plan.”

“So then today you can relax and stuff. Come on, we can go shopping!” Mimi moves over to Skitter’s side and drapes an arm over her shoulders, guiding the taller moth demon over to the store we had stopped in front of. I follow along as well. I got a bit of cash on me. Might as well browse, could find myself something better than a shirt and jeans. Heck, might even find something bug themed as well, go with the fact that I’m now the toughest son of a bug that there ever was, a cockroach.

“Hey how old are you now anyways?” Mimi asks Skitter.

“Eighteen.”

“Oh cool. I’m twenty four. Just turned that a couple of months ago.”

I walk off towards the guy’s section of the story, though in the corner of my eye, I can see Mimi drags Skitter off to the women’s side of the store. The mouse demon starts showing Skitter different outfits and trying to get her to try some on, some of which she tries, where as other’s she rejects. A onesie being one of them.

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I drag Skitty along with me as Skidmark follows us to the store. She’s barely offering any resistance as I bring her along with me to the woman’s side of the store. Oh this is going to be so fun! I haven’t been able to do this in so long. Now with all those paydays under my belt I can finally have some fun and spend it on something more than comics and that stupid TV licence thing they have here.

I push it from my thoughts as the boss walks off to the men’s section of the store. Probably for the best since he could use some new clothes as well. Maybe when we expand the gang and all that like what Skitty was saying we could do a theme kind of thing. I’ve never really done a theme thing before, and the Undersiders didn’t have a theme last I remembered, it could be cool.

We are in the middle of the racks when I let go of Skitty’s shoulders and turn around to see what I’m working with. Skinny, tall, with legs for days… are her breasts bigger than before? Could have sworn she was smaller, like a b-cup or something like that. I must have been paying more attention to the blood on the jacket than her. How many time… how many times, I push it from my mind. I’d rather not get caught up in old memories. I… I aggressively throw it out of my mind this time as it comes back. Skitter, no, Skitty. I’m… I’m focusing on Skitty.

Skitty stares at me with her big cute eyes. Definitively need to accentuate that. Maybe some glasses to go along with it, like big cute glasses. Maybe… I look around and a big grin starts to spread itself on my face.

“I know the perfect thing!” I say before walking off to one of the racks. Yes this is perfect, and totally works with in making her cuter!

“How about this?” I ask as I show her what I grabbed. Unfortunately, she doesn’t exactly look impressed with my choice.

“A onesie?” what? What’s wrong with a onesie?

“Yeah totally, it works great with your eyes and make you look cute! Come on see!” I guide her to a mirror where she can see for herself. I put the onesie in front of her where she still has her eyebrow raised.

“See!” I say, she doesn’t exactly brighten up however. She does start feeling the material though.

“Maybe if Hell was actually cold… but with this, I think I would die at night.”

“Oh, but if we had a cold day you’d wear it?”

“Maybe. I was more just thinking some practical clothes that aren’t an oversized shirt and some short shorts. I’d say a hoodie but I’ve already got my wings as a jacket.” Skitty says while indicating her fluffy jacket. Actually, I should probably take that jacket into account. She needs something to go with it and make it pimpin. Maybe… I hate to think back to it, but what had…?

“Okay then, what about, uh…”

“Did you ladies need some help?” A fox like demon saunters it’s way over to us as I try to think up some ideas for what could go well with Skitty’s coat. I haven’t really done much with long coats. I hadn’t needed one for a while.

“Perhaps, any suggestions what might go well with this coat? I got it recently and I’ve only just gotten the freedom to actually decide what I can wear,” Skitty says.

“Oh? Is your pimp letting you have a bit of fun deciding what to wear?” the foxy lady asks in return, mildly curious.

“No, I just finished my sentence, and then the world ended,” Skitty retorts.

“Oh dear, well, you’ve been out of practice for a while then, and you haven’t even had time to look up the most recent hell fashion trends have you? Well, we will just have to fix that. Do you need the jacket?”

“I’m quite attached to it,” With the way that I’ve seen her cuddle up in it when she was baby sitting Lil Mark, I’d say so. The little devil and her when I was passing by were all curled up and snuggling together. Skitty practically wears it everywhere.

“Let me guess, they’re your wings? Oh don’t act surprised, many older demons like to turn their wings into parts of their clothing. Though I wonder how you managed to figure it out, if you’re as new as you claim.” She stares at Skitty for a moment before continuing. “But then you must have been one of those ‘capes’ that were running around up on one of those Earths that’s got them.”

“I was,” the fox demon shrugs.

“figures, anyways, why don’t we figure out something for you to wear underneath. Oh and did you need anything ma’am?” I start as she suddenly begins addressing me.

“Oh uh, no, well maybe but you can attend to her first. She turned eighteen right when everything started going to crap.”

“Oh jeeze. Well then I’ll do my very best to help then! Do you want to come along or were you going to keep browsing until I can help?”

“I’ll come along, I want to see what she picks.” The foxy demon leads us over towards the changing rooms.

“So what are we working with then? Got a budget?”

“My budget is around a hundred,” I can imagine the store clerk frowning.

“Make that two hundred.” I say, it’s Skitty’s birthday, or well, close enough to it. She deserves something nice to go with the gun she got, as well as maybe a… No stop thinking about that. I’ve got a bit of money from not spending it on everything I see. Would be a shame to let a girl go without some clothes of her own.

“Alright then, I think I can make an outfit with that. Anything specific you are looking for? Or do you just want to have something casual?”

“Casual is fine.”

“Well then just give me a minute and I’ll be right back,” the fox demon walks off, and starts going around the store, grabbing a few different items. Most of them look like to be on the parts of the store where things are on sale, completely ignoring any of the racks where there wasn’t a sale going on. Was two hundred not a lot for clothes?

When the fox demon returns, she sets down a small pile of clothes down on a bench by the changing rooms.

“Alright, I’ve gotten a few different outfits for you to try.” I look over to the outfits for Taylor. One of them is a set of jeans and a light blue stripy loose fitting shirt. Another is a set of black pants and a black tee, with the final outfit being a Champagne skirt and orange tee to go with it. I’m not sure she would like the bright coloured one. Plus I don’t think that Skitty is a skirt girl despite having legs for days. Personally I think the contrasting colours would look best, rather than the one with the striped shirt.

They take a few moments to try on the two outfits. I smile when she leaves the changing rooms with the black pants and shirt, and even give a thumbs up. Skitty gives a small smile my way before changing back to her original clothes.

“So what did you think?” the fox demons asks.

“I like the black outfit, it shows off the coat better,” I voice my opinion.

“It does seem like a decent choice.” Though, now that I think about it, the other outfit had been pretty alright as well. It looked cute on her, and I can imagine what it would look like without the jacket.

“Though the other one did look cute as well.”

“Did it?”

“Yeah it did, plus it’s nice and light and it goes with your jacket well.”

“The stripes do go well with your coat,” the fox lady comments as she listens in. “It really make’s the blue pop,” Skitty nods along at her advice.

“And what about the third outfit?” our attendant asks, Skitty however frowns when she looks at that one.

“It’s not really what I am looking for.”

“Well alright then, you are still significantly under budget, did you want me to get you some more outfits?”

“Something simple please, and just one more. I don’t want to go over budget,” the fox demon nods before walking off.

“Not much of a clothes shopper are ya?” I ask Skitty and she shakes her head.

“Not really. Other than when I was taken as a kid, I’ve only really gone clothes shopping a few times. A few times with… someone I thought I knew, and a few times with my friends.”

“Really? I used to love clothes shopping, I’d run around the racks, put on a few shirts when no one was looking and have to be chased around the store by grandma when we had to leave.” I smile while remembering that. Most of my memories are not of happy times, but those days, those days were happy days. Didn’t have a care in the world, everything was sunshine and roses, those days with Grandma… Then they were over. Just like that.

“I never put on the clothes that were on the racks when I was a kid, but I did the rest of that as well. That was only if it was just a clothes store though. Otherwise whenever my parents wanted to find me they would find me with the books. I’d go to the shelves and find the most interesting looking book there, sit myself down, and then read. Mom knew where I was all the time, and when I got older, she would let me stay there while I read while she went shopping. I still had one older lady bring me to the front and made an announcement on the intercom about a lost child though.” I giggle at Skitty’s story. Fuddy duddy Grandmas who coddled kids, they can be over bearing, but at least they cared… Not like Mom and Dad.

“I guess they didn’t give you much free time when you were a Ward?” Skitty shakes her head.

“Not really any. For a long time they would just send me back to my cell whenever I wasn’t on Ward duties. Not much to do in there so I did my best to keep in shape. After a while it just became a hassle to keep doing so I argued for getting a room in the Wards lounge. There was a few of them that were vacant. Some people didn’t like that at all and tried to stop the transfer, but I talked to the leader of the Wards and the Protectorate leaders and got the transfer approved. Even so, I was confined to the base and wasn’t allowed to leave except for official business so I never really got much time to go clothes shopping,” I nod along as Skitty tells me more about her time in the Wards. Meanwhile I’m watching Adam trying on different coats and outfits while over on the men’s side of the store. Trying on fur lined coats, leather jackets, as well as a wide brimmed white fedora. I tilt my head a bit, and start glancing between Skitty and Adam, before smiling a bit.

“Just a sec I wanna see something,” I start walking over to the men’s side of the store and straight to Adam. While he’s distracted by one of the various leather jackets, I snatch the fedora off of his head. He lets out a surprised “Hey!” as his hat is taken. I quickly make my way back to Skitty who’s looking at me with an inquisitive expression. As I get to her, I plop the fedora on Skitty’s head and smile at how it looks. Combined with Skitty’s long fur coat, it strikes as almost appropriate to have a nice wide brimmed fedora. Maybe combined with the black outfit… I try to imagine it and grin harder, she would look pimpin.’ Oh that’s good I gotta use that!

“You look pimpin.’” I say through my wide grin. Skitty’s got a small smile on as she turns towards the mirror that’s in the dress room. Skitty turns this way and that, looking at the outfit she has on now and looking at the fedora, and how it mixes with the rest of it. She frowns however and messes with her antenna a little bit.

“Ooo, you look good. The hat really goes well with the coat. If you want I can make some adjustments so that your antenna can go through the hat. It’s a popular modification among those of us that have longer ears or things coming out of our heads,” the fox lady says as she returns with a new outfit. This one had a shirt with a moth in yellow printed out on it, and another pair of jeans to go along with it.

“It’s nice… how much is it?”

“Sixty dollars, even with the new outfit, if you got it all, you would still be below budget.” Skitty still looks unsure as she looks at herself in the mirror. Behind her I give the thumbs up again, and she gives a small smile.


	9. Christmas Special: Interlude: Clone

The Skittering Chaos Christmas Special, Clone Interlude

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I walk briskly down the street, my head high and swivelling, watching for any kind of danger as I walk. The hood of my hoodie, something I had snagged from a clothesline a couple of days back, was down despite wishing that I could put it up. With my horns, however, that’s an impossibility unless I get a hoodie with a much bigger hood.

With one of my hands, I stroke one of my horns. They’re large things that spring from the sides of my head and go back, then forwards, like goat horns. The horns come forward just enough that the tips were in line with my chin. Not particularly useful for goring people unless I didn’t mind possibly breaking my nose at the same time.

Even so, I continued to stroke my horn, passing by storefronts and even storefronts where the glass wasn’t broken, displaying the fine merchandise inside. There were demonic cops and other things in uniforms on the various street corners while people wandered around gazing at the various merchandise that was spread around. Signs declared the various stores and the streets are bustling with various kinds of traffic, ranging from peddling bikers to regular cars. It reminds me of the boardwalk in Brockton, all nice looking while the rest of the city was shit, or at least, parts of it. There certainly were many more nice areas in Pentagram city than in Brockton Bay, especially when I left the world of the living.

As I am walking, I notice that people have begun putting up various wreaths, and other things that look rather Christmassy. Did demons even celebrate Christmas? Maybe the sinners but for demons, the holiday just meant that their hated enemy was born or something. Even so, I watch out of the corners of my eyes and around my hood as Imps, demons, and sinners alike all begin decorating the various storefronts, hanging up lights, and I even see a few places have begun to advertise candy cane hot chocolates and other festive things.

My answer however comes when I pass a shop window where the owner is putting up a sign announcing that there was going to be a “YULETIDE SALE!” So they weren’t celebrating Christmas, but the pagan equivalent, Yule. That certainly made more sense than them celebrating the birth of Christ.

While I’m watching out I notice an owl looking demon across the street do a double-take as she looks my way. Shit. She’ll likely call the enforcer equivalent here and get me kicked off the street. Rather than wait for her to call them, I turn into an alleyway. Not exactly the safest thing to do, but this was fairly close to the wealthy district so the place should be fine.

I casually continue down the alleyway, watching for anything that might pop out. People, animals, possibly even giant bugs, there were a lot of strange things in the alleyways of Pentagram city. As I walk through the alleyway, I come across a chain-link fence dividing the alleyway of the wealthy district from the other alleyways here in the city. I look back and my eyes widen as I see the owl woman turn into the alleyway. Oh shit.

Rather than wait, I latch onto the fence and begin climbing. I hear the owl demon call out to me but I ignore her, preferring to not take chances and just book it. I’m not ending up in some woman’s basement for her to do whatever with!

Luckily the fence isn’t too high and I bolt for it, not even looking back as I run down the alleyway. Reaching to the small of my back, I pull from my belt a revolver I had grabbed from the aftermath of some firefight that had gone on between a bunch of demons. I hear a sound like flapping wings and there is a rush of wind as I look back. The owl demon is running after me and just jumped the fence, her large eyes intense as she charges after me.

Not wanting to take a chance trying to shoot at her I duck around a corner and keep running, hoping to lose her in the maze of alleyways that ran between the various buildings in Pentagram city.

Left, right, and left again, I run halfway down an alley before taking another left before I look back. I hug the wall and raise my gun to watch the entrance of the alleyway, waiting to hear anything. I wait… one moment… two… I look up, expecting to see the owl demon overhead, wings flapping as she dives at me, yet, nothing.

Sighing, I step away from the wall and start making my way further into the alleyway. It seems I’ve lost my pursuer for the moment. The alleyway is littered with graffiti, showing the various gang signs like any other crime-filled city on Earth. I recognise a few of them from being in the area for a few weeks now. The one with the serpent and sword was some old gang sign that was from a gang that had long been beaten away from the area so I don’t pay it much mind. Another was a gang sign I’ve heard was a warning about raiders. Looked like some wolf head spray-painted in red. Called themselves the Crimson gang and they made trips into the city every once and a while when things started getting crazy. Judging by the fact that it was half-covered by some graffiti artist’s own stylised “Tyrone’s a bitch!” sign, it wasn’t very relevant.

I keep walking along the alleyway, looking at the various graffiti art as I do so, seeing older gang signs. Then I notice a newer looking one. There was writing underneath it, but it was in a language I didn’t know, what I did know, was the image of a fanged mouth looking like it was about to bite. I cock the hammer of my revolver and look down the alley I’m in. The sign was known to nearly anyone who wandered the alleyways and survived for more than a few weeks. Biters. A designation given to any kind of demon munching creature that decided to turn the alleys into their home. They could range from Demonic Hellhounds that had gotten a taste of demon flesh, to giant insects. Sometimes they were even designated for feral demons that stayed in an area long term. So long as they tried to eat Demons and were unable to be reasoned with they were called biters by the alley going homeless of Pentagram city.

Cautiously, I start to walk back towards the alley I had just come from. Hopefully, the owl lady wasn’t there to greet me, and even if she was, I hadn’t seen her armed, so hopefully whatever magic she had could be interrupted by my bullets.

No luck however as I pass a trash can, and it bursts open. Without even looking, I fire a shot into the can, hitting something and knocking the can over. I spare the thing a glance. The thing was red-skinned, scythes for arms, and almost looked raptor-like. I hear a couple more trash bins topple over, revealing the scythe raptors popping out of them, and even a dumpster deeper in flipped its lid to reveal a trio of the creatures.

Without hesitation, I try to sight the closest one as quickly as possible and fire off a shot. It goes wide and I fire again. I miss once more as the kick of the weapon throws my aim off. Rather than try for a third shot, I turn and run. I hear loud screeching behind me but I don’t look back, not yet. There are two more garbage cans down the alleyway which topple over, revealing their inhabitants. Gritting my teeth, I continue my charge down the alleyway.

The first of the creatures from the front gets close but I practically shove my revolver in its face before squeezing the trigger, sending a jolt of pain through my wrist as the power of the revolver forces it upwards from the recoil. No matter, not pain, no getting out of here in one piece. The thing’s face is blown off as I keep running. The other creature I barely have time to readjust my aim before it’s nearly on me.

The biter lunges at me and I try to dodge to the side, only to take a sideswipe from the scythe arm. Without my bugs to use to express my pain, I just settle for shouting “Fuck!” as loud as I can before I fire my last round into the creature as I pass it. It hits the biter in the arm, and I can see the others are gaining on me, nearly at my heels. Fuck!

I drop my heavy gun, I try to sprint harder, I try to swing my arms, anything to get me away from those things. Then, ahead, I see the owl lady standing in front of the alleyway, levelling some kind of gun at me. I see her mouth moving but the blood in my ears is pumping too loudly and I can’t hear her. However, I see her take aim and I dive, just trying to last even a second more. God, I wish I hadn’t dropped my revolver now!

Suddenly my world is the sound of thunder as I hear bullets whizz past overhead, slamming into some of the biters that were behind me, making meaty whacks and pained groans as they fall over. I hear panicked yips from behind me that are already starting to get farther away.

I lay there a second, then, as I hear the sound of shoes on concrete getting closer, I look up. There, the owl lady is walking towards me, her big expressive owl eyes looking at me concerned. I don’t know why she decided to save me, but then, when she speaks I realise.

“Taylor?”

“M-mom?” I say before I can stop myself. How is she here? How? Mom was the greatest, kindest person I’ve ever known, she, how, no she can’t have, she can’t have gone to Hell. Yet… here she is… Mom… Annette drops her gun as she runs forward towards me. I… I shouldn’t have said that. I start to get up but Annette wraps me in a hug, and I feel tears on my cheek. I want to hit myself. No… no… this… this was wrong. I…

I’m not Taylor…

Even so, Annette embraces me like my false memories of being Taylor informed me she would. It… it felt good. It… fuck… it… Rather than fight it, I just hug her back, burying my face in her shoulder. I… damn it.

“It’s okay little owl, it’s okay little owl, mommy’s here,” as she mentioned “mommy,” it felt like a dagger in me. Despite my memories, despite this emotion, intellectually, I knew that my mother wasn’t this wonderful woman, it wasn’t Annette. Not really. The closest I could stretch it was that she was my grandmother, but even that didn’t feel right.

No, my mother was that bitch Noelle, who didn’t care for me, who wanted me to kill Dad… no, Danny. I clench my fist behind Mom… Annette’s back, and grind my teeth once more.

“Shhh, there there… I’m here now… you don’t have to worry anymore,” Mom… Annette rubs my back just like she used… no… like… as she did to Taylor. She… she never did it to me. I… this… this is wrong, I… I should just…

Yet… despite knowing what I should do, despite knowing the right thing, I can’t bring myself to even let go of Mo… Annette. When I try to get the words out, to say that I’m not her little owl, I’m a fake, a fraud, an evil clone, the words get choked up in my throat, and I can’t say anything. Mom holds me tighter, a happy hum worming its way into my ear. I feel more tears begin to fall down my cheeks. I silently mouth “sorry.”

And I embrace her.


	10. Chapter 10

The Skittering Chaos 10

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I unload my gun and check for what must have been the fifth time that the bullets I have in my gun are actually the rubber bullets we were going to be using for training. Once more, I see the dull rubber tips inside their casing. I had gotten us the rubber bullets for training purposes, as, due to our brute rating from being demons, they were basically worthless as non-lethal deterrents unless they were fired from high calibre weaponry. Demons didn’t even consider rubber bullets as something that a lethal gun would fire, hence, how I managed to buy them from a dollar store we had passed while out shopping.

The side door to the warehouse swung open and out came Adam, carrying his magical baseball railgun. The glow on the gun however much less than when he had come and helped me out with the lizard thugs. It was still big, bulky and honestly looked like a tinkered up bazooka, but he had lessened the output of the thing to have a bit more power than the average baseball cannon. We would however still be treating it as if it still had its original power.

Mimi, on the other hand, sat by the sidelines, idly reading a comic of hers while her gun, a small twenty-two pistol sat to the side. Despite all the danger here, she has never fired a gun, and really only had one because a concerned neighbour in her apartment block had given it to her for her own protection. Even so, she apparently had never used it, her excuse being that she didn’t like the sound of gunfire.

It must be unfortunate for the girl with the city being in such disarray as it is. She seems to have adapted to it well enough though, not even flinching when there was gunfire off in the distance. Reminds me of some of the kids in Brockton when Bakuda was blowing the entire place to hell and back and the ABB were fighting in the streets. I saw kids who would sometimes stare off towards gunfire when it happened in Brockton to just ignoring it entirely. In Brockton during those times, gunfire was just another sound of the city, and it became even more so after Leviathan hit.

“Alright, I want to see what we are working with before we actually plan on getting into a fight. Adam, did well with the barriers and keeping heads down in those riots, so I want to see what you can do one on one,” I turn to Mimi. “If you want to stay you're getting involved too,” I tell her and she nods after looking up from her comic book.

“Ain’t we just waiting for Sherrel to finish installing the turret on the van and shit? If you really think she ain’t going to be done in the next ten minutes, you must be trippin,’”

“That’s why it’s just going to be a spar, see where we are properly and where we can improve. I did this all the time with the Chicago Wards when I joined them after leaving Brockton,”

“Shit, fine by me, just don’t expect me to go easy on ya just ‘cause you’re new ‘round here,” Adam says, a big grin on his face. Thank God they weren’t his old teeth; those would have been unpleasant to see. Even so, when he gets to his spot, he doesn’t relax. Good, if that hadn’t just been bravado I would have to wonder if he was all there in the head.

I draw on him while moving to the side, Adam ducks behind a dumpster and already I can see fields going up in the middle of the alleyway. I charge forward while keeping my pistol trained on the dumpster he’s hiding behind, meanwhile, the barrier’s glow is getting brighter. While I charge I lay down my own barriers, speeding me along to Adam’s own barrier.

Adam however pokes his gun around the corner and starts to blind fire, sending his baseballs down the alleyway at random, but just close enough I have to break off my charge as a few get too close for comfort. With the barrier getting brighter while using the bugs I have on him to get a general idea of where he’s aiming, I try to fire a few bullets his way, hoping to catch his hand, but the barrier is interfering with my bullets, like when hitting water. The sudden resistance is enough to keep my bullets from getting to the dumpster on target.

Adam’s gotten faster at laying down his barriers than I remember seeing in videos from before my cape days. Whether that was because Adam managed to get more experience while down here or due to it being demonic magic rather than some eldritch shard power I don’t know.

Secure in his position now with the further intensifying barrier Adam finally steps out from it, a smug grin on his face as he takes aim and fires. Luckily because of my bugs on his gun as well as on his baseballs, I’m just able to dodge the balls as they come at me, though as the barrier between us intensifies, the faster the balls come. I set down some barriers to accelerate myself as I retreat. At the same time, I'm laying down some more to slow down the balls being sent my way.

Meanwhile, I begin to layer some barriers down near Adam’s main barrier, pointing straight up. Adam’s barriers can’t go on forever in any direction, just high enough that people can’t usually jump over them. I know that in some fights Adam’s had in life fliers like Glory Girl were able to fly over the barriers, and considering that most capes copied their power with their magic, myself included. To make sure, however, I sense Adam’s barrier with my antennae. Was I Lisa, I’d likely be grinning.

I call my swarm down on Adam, bugs flying down from the roof and the dumpster. I didn’t have as many as when I still had my old power, but I’d been hard at work possessing as many bugs as I could get a hold of in the short amount of time since I had learned how to take control of them. I unfurl my wings and dash in as my bugs go straight for Adam’s eyes, not biting them or anything, just distracting him, while the other bugs I had started biting at Adam’s hands. I hear Adam shout out in surprise while I take advantage of the lull to advance my way up to my barriers, of course using additional ones to boost myself forward faster. As I hit my vertical barriers I open my wings up wide and push down with them as I jump up, boosted by my previously placed barriers.

For a moment I’m high in her air, over the roofs of the warehouse and short buildings around us. I look down to my opponent, and almost by instinct, I move my wings while extending my foot out. Adam finally waves my bugs out of his face long enough to look for me, his baseball cannon ready. For a moment, right before the heel of my shoe makes contact, his face is scrunches in confusion as I’m no longer on my side of his barrier.

My heel makes contact and Adam’s head jerks back. Adam makes a sound, more surprised than in pain as my kick drives him into the ground. With my wings, I flap them once so I don’t follow him downwards and curb stomp him. Even so, he bounces a little on the ground and his head makes a meaty thwack as it impacts the ground. As I land on the cement, Adam makes a pained sound while on the ground.

Shit, I think I hit him too hard.

I fold my wings back into their fluffy coat and rush to Adam. Even with our natural demonic brute rating, it was still better to check to make sure that Adam was alright. Luckily he’s still groaning on the ground so Adam wasn’t knocked unconscious. He looks up at me looking over him.

“Mother fu- where the fuck did you come from?” Adam immediately looks upwards to the top of his barrier behind me. At least he isn’t disorientated, and he isn’t slurring his words. He should be fine.

“Did you fuckin’ dive kick me!?” Adam accuses, his face scrunching up more as he looks even more incredulous. “Damn.”

“Glad to see you’re doing alright,” I say as I reach a hand out to Adam, a small smile on my face.

“A mother fuckin’ dive kick. Thought that shit was only in movies ‘n’ shit,” he says as he grabs my offered hand, and I pull him up.

“There are a few capes that use it, though they can usually fly somehow or can jump well,” this was one of my very few dive kicks I’ve ever done. Most of the time I have had my baton with me or my gun, or I just used my bugs. With how I’ve changed, however, until I get a large enough swarm, and maybe get a breeding operation going, I will have to be a bit more frugal with how I used my insects. Especially since I know that a few have been destroyed while riding Adam’s baseballs, getting crushed while immobilised on the balls due to the g-force if they hadn’t fallen off.

“Oh yeah?” Adam says as he uses a hand to crack his neck, making popping sounds as he makes sure his head is screwed on right. “Then why didn’t Glory Hole ever dive kick?” I shrug.

“I think she was more of a pugilist,” I say before turning to Mimi. I can see the barrier Adam had made has already begun to fade, and I do the same with my own. Rather than turning tail, Mimi seems to consider me for a moment before putting down her book. Even so, she looks nervous.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” I say despite what I had said earlier. While I would like her to participate and join us, I wasn’t going to force her. This wasn’t the end of the world, and this wasn’t the Wards. Even so, it would be good to get a grip on what I might be working with.

“I, if that’s alright?” she asks, and I nod.

“Yeah, it’s not a problem. I want to help you, not beat you up,” when he hears that, Adam snorts.

“Could of fooled me,” Adam complains as he leans back on a wall by the table that Mimi’s sitting on.

“Unlike her, you were an experienced cape. You actually know a thing or two about fighting, she doesn’t,” as far as I know.

“Glad to actually be acknowledged. You know I swear I used to beat the shit out of half the newbie capes that came to Brockton ‘n’ shit from outta town just cause they think I ain’t shit,”

“You never did give much of a decent showing when you showed up on video.”

“Well excuse me for being a medium-sized fish in a pond full of big ass mother fuckers, you included,” I let the matter drop.

“Either way we might as well show you how to use your gun, you’ve never had to use it before right?” Mimi nods at that and presents it to me. I take the gun gingerly and begin to look it over. The gun itself is fairly light and as I slip my hand around the grip, it feels comfortable enough. I aim down the sights and they seem decent enough, though if Mimi has never fired it before the sights would have to be calibrated, she couldn’t cheat at shooting as I do with my bugs. I feel for a button and as I hit it, the magazine slides out. It’s got a full payload inside the magazine. I load the magazine back in and pull back the slide a few times, letting the bullets fall to the table, my bugs forming a small area for them to fall into. Some of the bullets bounce out of the makeshift bin so I have some of my flying bugs grab before they can roll away. I watch the chamber, looking for any feed failures as I empty the magazine. With no failures, the magazine spring seems to have kept its tension. Then once more I slide out the now empty magazine and pull back the slide once more to make sure that there are no rounds in the chamber I didn’t know about.

“Have you ever disassembled this?” I ask Mimi who just shakes her head. Nodding, I begin to look for a way to disassemble the gun. The model looks like a knock off of a 22 Ruger pistol. Finding the catch in the back of the pistol, I begin to process of disassembling the pistol, pulling the pin, sliding the barrel off, and looking through the thing. The barrel itself looks clean enough, as well as the spring, and there is barely any kind of gunk inside the receiver aside from some dust and lint from being carried inside of Mimi’s hoodie pocket all this time. With a small burst of magic, I clear out the receiver and begin to reassemble the gun.

I slot in the magazine and the slide cocks in automatically. To make sure I reassemble the thing correctly and didn’t screw up somewhere, I aim at the wall of the abandoned building and then squeeze down on the trigger, watching as the slide comes back and forth. Luckily there doesn't seem to be any kind of problem while I continue to pull the trigger and watch for anything wrong. Eventually, I present the pistol back to Mimi.

“It’s an alright gun, though not as useful as it would be on Earth,” I turn to Adam. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything that could work as target practice?”

“Yeah, we got some cans and shit up in the loft. You want me to go get them?” I nod.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” and I turn my attention back to Mimi.

“Alright so since you’ve never fired a gun before I’ll just go over the basics while we wait for Adam to get back, and I can let you reload the magazine with your bullets there.”

<><><><><><><><><><><><><>

It wasn't long before Adam came back with the cans and Mimi got to start shooting. The building beside us wasn’t occupied so we were fine to shoot at it, and Little Mark was awake so we didn’t have to worry about waking him, especially since Sherrel had turned on some video for him to watch and had Felix watching over him for a little extra pay.

Mimi turned out to be a fairly good shot once we had gotten the sights all properly aligned. She wasn’t hitting every shot but she did manage to hit most of the cans she shot at with the first shot and the rest with her second shot, with only the ones we had set up farther away sometimes taking more. Compared to some of the Wards I had actually gotten to come down to the gun range, she had potential. There had been some awkwardness at the start, but she had adjusted to using the gun quickly enough and was actually enjoying it.

After getting through her magazine she had wanted to shoot some more despite having no bullets left. Taking pity on her, I let her use my colt replica. The shooting for a moment was a bit off, hitting beside the cans that were beyond point-blank, but she quickly got her rhythm back and was popping cans off with my remaining rubber bullets.

That was the scene Sherrel opened the door to, Mimi smiling as she pops off rounds at cans down the alleyway, angled so that unless she fired wildly off course, they would impact the brick of the abandoned building beside us. With my bugs on her, I knew that she was coming, and so was packing up the small ammo box I had that I was re-supplying Mimi with.

“Having fun?” Sherrel asks. Mimi nods emphatically as she lined up the shot to the last can at the back of our makeshift range. With a final bang, the four of us watch the last can topple over.

“Yeah, it’s… different. I guess I never realised that it would actually be fun to try,” Mimi explains. “Guess you’re heading out now huh?” I nod. Sherrel and I were going to be heading out so that I could get an idea of where all the various pubs that vigilantes frequent so that I could spy on them and find out where we might find their bases so that we could hit them. With the loot gathered from their bases, we could finance and grow the Merchants. Hopefully, we wouldn’t have to hit too many before we made enough money to begin to properly expand.

“Ha, you think that’s fun? How about next time you can try out Sherrel’s magnum, shit’s cash,” Mimi’s eyes go wide before looking over to Sherrel, her eyes practically sparkling.

“Can I?” the mouse demon asks and Sherrel just shrugs.

“Sure, just warn me so I can grab a few more rounds from the shop,” with that, Sherrel turns to me.

“I’ll catch up in a moment, I’ve got to show Mimi a thing or two about disassembling her gun and how to properly clean it before I leave,”

“Sounds good to me, I need to check to make sure that the turret won’t catch after a few rotations anyways,” and with that, Sherrel walks back into the garage. Mimi looks at me curiously and I beckon her over. As Mimi walks over, she makes sure to keep the gun I was lending her pointed at the ground, and keeping her finger off the trigger like I taught her, bringing a small smile to my face.

“Alright, since I’m sure you’re going to be using your gun a bit more often now, you’ve also got to learn how to clean it properly,” I start and Mimi watches in rapt attention as I begin to explain to her how to disassemble her Ruger knock-off, and showing off some of the various minor details of the pistol.

I make sure to have Mimi assemble and disassemble the thing a couple of times until she can do it without my help. She isn’t fast at it but it shouldn’t matter so long as she keeps the thing clean when she isn’t using it.

“I’m going to head in, I still need to go out with Sherrel and check those places Felix gave me,” I tell her as Mimi finishes reassembling her pistol once more. She looks up at me and smiles my way.

“Hey, thanks for showing me this, and well, not making me fight and stuff. I’m, well, I don’t really want to fight really,” Mimi says as she stuffs her Ruger into her hoodie pocket.

“It’s alright, not all of us are really cut out for a fight. Though, you’re going to have to choose to either fight with us or run at some point. With a gun or without, I hope you will fight with us if things come to it,” I say as I walk to the garage to let her stew on what I’ve said. Despite things being calm at the moment, I’m sure that us claiming the territory around us will change that, and soon she’ll have to choose whether she’s going to stand with us or not. While it will be unfortunate if she does decide to run, I won’t begrudge her. When she joined the new Merchants, I doubt she thought it would end up like this.

In the garage section of the warehouse, I can see the van. The thing had been outfitted with a set of armour plates that had been welded together that honestly made it look a bit like a block of scrap steel welded together with the front sticking out. The top of the van held the tank turret and the front, comparatively, was lightly armoured, though I can still see where scrap metal has been welded to reinforce the engine block and the more solid metal parts. Surprisingly, the thing hadn’t gotten any lower to the ground despite the extra weight. Perhaps some of the tinker knowledge had transferred over to Sherrel, or maybe she just retained some of the less crazy things that her shard had her tinker up.

Sherrel herself is in the tank turret, spinning the thing around. The turret doesn’t spin very fast but at a range, it wouldn’t matter as much as if it were in close quarters. Considering what most of the vehicles look like in Pentagram city, that is to say, a complete lack of tanks, unless the demons that were attacking the van had anti-tank weaponry, whoever was in the turret likely had enough time to sight the target and just blow them away. The turret, however, as I approach, does look familiar. It almost looks like it came off of some tank from world war two. It wasn’t a German one I don’t think, those ones were generally flatter, and it definitely didn’t look like a Sherman. It kind of looked like someone had taken a round steel bin, and had attached a tank barrel on the thing, and flattened the top of it so that it was at an angle. It wasn’t exactly pretty, but it actually fit in with the rest of the van’s armour. As the tank turret turns towards me, Sherrel seemed to spot me from within and the turret stops, pointing the barrel right at me.

If I didn’t know that Sherrel was the one that was in that van, this might have been intimidating. Instead, Sherrel crawls her way to the front of the van, her larger form getting in the way, causing her, assets, to jiggle in some… uncomfortable ways, as she finally got to the front and climbs out the doorway. Once she is all sorted out, she walks up to me, a nervous smile on her face as she approaches.

“So? What do ya think?” Sherrel asks. It looks like one of the contraptions that she’d have made during her Squealer days, though less crazy. It spoke less of Mad Max and more of something an African warlord thought counted as a tank. Even so, it looks good, and it had fewer random bits sticking out of strange places as some of her vehicles in life have had.

“It looks good,” I compliment. Sherrel beams at the praise, and then she reaches out and pulls me close. Not sure what to do, I just let her until she let go.

“So we’re off to find some vigilantes, any idea where they are?” Sherrel asks. In response, I reach into my long coat and pull from it a list of various bars and pubs with various addresses on them. All of them were given to me by Felix when he asked his various brothers and sisters what bars the vigilante’s hung out in across Pentagram city. It wasn’t an exhaustive list, but it did give a few dozen places in clusters across the city. Luckily, my ability to control bugs didn’t seem to be affected by distance, as I still had control of some of the bugs I had gotten while Adam, Mimi, and I had gone shopping, outside of my range.

“These are all the bars and pubs that Felix says his family knows have some vigilante activity,” I say while presenting the list to Sherrel. Sherrel looks it over, mumbling the various pubs and street addresses next to them, nodding as she went until she reached a specific one.

“Oh hey, I’ve been to this one a few times, we should go drinking after we get this done,” I stop, and surprisingly, Sherrel does as well. She looks over to me, an eyebrow raised. “Have you ever even had alcohol?” Sherrel asks.

“No, part of my probation in the Wards prohibited alcohol since I was, or rather still am, underage,” it also didn’t help that they had been looking for any kind of slip up to put on my record. Not that I had time to drink in the Wards, but it was one more thing they wanted to do to add to the case they likely had been making to take me off the team and either send me somewhere where I wouldn’t cause trouble or possibly even, send me straight to Juvenile Detention.

At my explanation, Sherrel’s lips slowly close, and a wide grin spreads across her shiny plastic face.

“Oh, I’m definitely going to be taking you out drinking then, I wanna see you have your first drink!” Sherrel then takes off for the driver seat of the van. Wait, I can’t drink yet.

“But!”

“No butts! I clean enough of them with Mark!” Sherrel calls back, having popped open the van's driver-side door and calling out over it. Sighing I walk over to the passenger side of the van and climb in. Considering drugs were legal here, I doubt there is an official drinking age or any kind of law regarding it really. Though if she thinks that I’m going to let her have some drinks when she’s my only ticket back here, she’s got another thing coming.

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We drive around the city trying to find the various addresses to the bars that Felix gave us the names for. Most of them were dives and bars with entrances hidden in alleyways. There were a few that actually looked like reputable joints, but they were few and far between. While we drove, I let my more predatory bugs resume their natural movements, searching for prey and before they were about to kill their prey, I had them bring it to me.

A lot of the bugs in Pentagram city were carnivorous and killing other bugs rather than scavenging off the debris and detritus left behind by civilization. Not to say that there wasn’t a massive amount of scavengers that were loving the chaos that was being left behind by the various vigilante attacks and random gunfights that were breaking out between gangs who were taking advantage of the chaos the Vigilante’s were causing.

More than a few times I had Sherrel stop so that I could go search through the aftermath of gunfights. Most of the time, they were stripped clean of everything other than their clothes and were being picked at by bugs. Bugs weren’t the only scavengers in this city. Though, I did manage to find a few wallets and some pistols here and there. Nothing too large though. Some of these might make a good gift to Mimi so she can finally get a proper gun for down here.

We reach our final stop on the list, a pub named “The Toy Bar.” It seems like an alright place, that is to say, it isn’t some bar down an alleyway. I begin to fill the place with some of the bugs I got from the previous looting when Sherrel turns the van off. I look over to her but she’s already getting out of the van.

“Come on, I said we were going for a drink, I want to see you get your first!” and with that, she slams the door. She hadn’t forgotten about it as I had hoped. I get out of the van and walk after Sherrel. I’m not letting my ride back to the warehouse get drunk, especially since I doubt she would even consider leaving her van here without being knocked out first.

We enter the place and the first thing that hits me about the place is how little traffic there is here. Only a few people in the place, one blue-skinned demon is drinking at the bar and a couple consisting of a lizard creature and a faun is in the corner sharing drinks. The bartender looks like some kind of plastic army soldier toy, all green plastic, and I can see a trench gun on the back wall, feeling it with my bugs though it doesn’t seem to be made out of plastic but rather spray painted to be green. Interestingly, another was under the bar counter, and rather than the stereotypical pump shotgun, I can feel with the bugs I had bugged this place with, that it feels more like the automatic shotguns that I have seen some PRT and SWAT units use when they were expecting heavy resistance.

“Sherrel! You god damn sad excuse for a sex toy! You got a lot of nerve coming back here after the shit you pulled!” the toy soldier accuses, his plastic face glaring at her which stops Sherrel short. The toy soldier glares for another moment, and my hand slowly moves to the pistol in my belt. Then, the toy soldier smiles.

“Ya haven’t called, I was worried about ya, come on here and get yourself a seat, I’ll get you your favourite,” He says and turns around.

“Hold on, she’s the designated driver,” I protest. The toy soldier looks back at Sherrel and she sheepishly nods.

“Huh, well tell you what, I’ll drive you back to your place so you can have a drink as well. Your’s is the eyesore out front right?”

“Hey!” Sherrel protests. “It ain’t an eyesore she’s my baby.”

“Yeah, with a face only a mother can love,” the soldier retorts as he sets down a cup filled with ice and starts filling it with a mixture of alcohol, some fizzy pop, and a straw.

“Jackass,” was Sherrel’s reply as she drank from the straw in her cup. The soldier gave a chuckle before turning to me.

“So what’ll you be having missy? I’m Anthony by the way.”

“Skitty,” I tell him, using my cutesy nickname rather than my new demonic name. Considering this place caters to vigilantes, and they had decided that I was persona non grata, it would be better to keep that name under wraps until the Merchants had grown strong enough to be able to take on roving gangs of vigilantes. While there is a danger of realising the connection, my old villain name was known to inspire fear and making it all cutesy would hopefully be enough to throw them off.

“Skitty then, what’ll you be having?” Anthony asks again, not really knowing what to pick, I look at the back of the bar, but I might as well be looking at a sign in a foreign language.

“I’ll just have what she's having,” I say eventually and Anthony nods. I sit down beside Sherrel and take my hat off to set down on the bar.

“So how did you find out about this place?” I ask, not wanting to be a bore as Sherrel stops sipping from her drink. Sherrel takes a second to think.

“She walked into my bar looking like a hot mess,” Anthony said as he continues to pour my drink.

“Yeah, I didn’t even have any clothes,” Sherrel agrees before continuing. “I just woke up on the street to some guy touching me on the street, luckily he was a dumb ass and I got a good kick in before he tried anything else. Something like that happen to you?” I shake my head.

“No, I had my wings so I just used those as a poncho until I figured out how to turn them into my coat here.”

“Lucky, I just woke up with not a stitch on me and even bigger tits than I had before. I had to get outta there so I just ran into the first door that was open.”

“Which was here, here ya go,” Anthony says as he passes me the drink. Picking it up I take an experimental sip. It’s sweet, with a bit of a strange taste that’s sitting alongside it. It definitely isn’t bad though.

“Yeah, anyways, Anthony took one look at me, and walked off to get me a shirt and some pants.”

“It’s what any good American would do,” he said matter-of-factly.

“So yeah, after that he helped me for a bit while I got back on my feet,” Anthony smiles at that.

“I still get customers asking about you sometimes, say, why not come back just for a weekend, see the guys again? You always did get a big ass tip,” Anthony asks but Sherrel just lets out a chuckle.

“And get practically molested again? Nah, I had enough of that when I was alive, I think I’ll stick to getting frisky with Adam thank you very much,” So he was another person who liked to help. Maybe, I ponder as I take another sip, he could help us?

“So what about you two? When’d you two meet?” Anthony asks, and Sherrel is all too happy to oblige.

“We saw her on the sidewalk getting harassed by some of Valentino’s goons. ‘Course we didn’t know that they were Valentino’s at the time. Just saw her getting harassed. Skiddy saw her first and I wasn’t about to stop him. I wouldn’t want that shit to happen to me so we just stopped by the road and Skiddy got out and blasted one. Turns out Skitty here knew some magic so when she blasted them away, I ran one over, and then we picked her up and got ourselves a new Merchant.”

“Well I’m glad my kindness rubbed off on you a bit, so what have you been doing lately?” This might be a good idea to see where his loyalties lie or even what he thinks about the vigilantes. If he betrays us, I’ll know, and we can quickly get rid of him.

“Laying low mostly,” I remark.

“Oh?”

“You know that big shoot out in Valentino’s territory?” I ask and one of Anthony’s plastic eyebrows rises up.

“Other than on the news, there were a few guys who were in here before that were talking about it, why? You involved with the vigilantes or something?” He asks, placing his hands on the bar, nearby enough to his auto shotgun that he could pull it out quickly.

“No, but they did attack while we were there.”

“So you’re hiding from Valentino or something?”

“The vigilantes, some of them attacked us and we had to defend ourselves,” I ready my magic, prepared to blast Anthony back if he tries to draw on us. I hope he doesn’t but vigilantes do frequent here according to Felix. Instead of trying to draw though, he just shakes his head.

“Some people can’t get it in their head that this place just isn’t America,” Anthony leans heavily on the counter now, arms folded underneath him. “But then, America’s been looking a lot less like the America I fought for from what I heard. Done get me wrong. Some of them are good people just trying to help, some of them are just trying to make the world make sense again. While they are trying to do good, they’re hurting a lot of people with what they are doing. From half the things I’ve heard, they don’t even have a plan; they’re just attacking people for laws and crimes that don’t exist here. Some of the shit people were getting attacked over in some of the territories that the vigilantes held back before they got broken up by the big man himself was mad. Whatever happened to “give me liberty or give me death?” fuckin’ bullshit...”

I don’t even know half of what he’s talking about, and he seems to have gone into his own little rant while talking about them. He’s probably right in that the vigilantes are trying to make things better, and maybe I can use that. The vigilantes and I have similar goals, of making things better. Maybe I can convince some of them to join me, the ones who haven’t decided that I’m some threat to deal with before I get too big.

“Perhaps you could help us,” I venture as I swirl my drink. “We, want to see about making things better here. You see, back in Brockton Bay, I and my friends all lead efforts to try and improve the city after a disaster hit. The government and its various organs were being useless, so we took it upon ourselves to try and protect the people of the city while the government only protected those that are rich and worth protecting,” there had never been an official policy regarding the PRT and the Protectorate pulling back to the few wealthy areas of Brockton, but that had been what had essentially happened. Everywhere beyond the rich suburbs had been abandoned, and it had been up to us to re-establish order there. Pentagram city was in a similar state of chaos with all the vigilantes stirring up the pot of an already heavily divided city, separated into little fiefdoms who were now taking advantage of the chaos that the vigilantes were leaving behind.

“Pentagram city is in a similar situation. The government or whoever is not willing to come in and help anyone here, everyone is fighting, and if Pentagram city was in America, it would likely be quarantined. I want to try and make an island of stability here that we can use to try and help the people here, like my friends and I did in Brockton Bay. We can’t do it alone, however. Right now, it’s just us, but if you would help us, direct people to us, I think we can replicate the good my friends and I did in Brockton here in Pentagram. That sounds like something you could do for us?”

The other patrons are all quiet as they seem to have taken an interest in what I was saying, watching us as I talk about what I want to do, what I want to accomplish here. Anthony himself looks at me for a long couple of moments, considering whether he wants to get involved with us and help us out.

I won’t begrudge him if he doesn’t want to join up. Not everyone can handle it all. I had been able the first time but it had been a lot of work. I would do it again in a heartbeat, though I might relegate some more to Charlotte, or even have seen about getting some more help than I had originally. Lisa had been there but I had continued to do things mostly my way. Maybe, maybe I could have included Dad in all of it. He wouldn’t have like that I was a villain, but if I had shown him what I was trying to do and that I was working towards bringing Brockton back from the brink, maybe I could have gotten him on board with me.

So many maybes, so many things I could have done differently to make things better, yet largely I would do it all over again. This may not be a second chance a life, but in a way, by trying this all over again, I was getting a second chance. I was going to drag my little section of hell up from the pit it had fallen down, and I would do it better than I had the first time.

This time, I would do better.

Finally, Anthony seems to stir and he looks up at me, an amused smile on his face.

“Fancy yourself an Overlord do ya?” I think about responding with a resounding no, but, that wasn’t really true, was it? Despite it being possible to easily connect it back to me and my cape identity, I was asking him to send people our way to join us in at the Merchants. He already knew Sherrel and where we live, he could easily bring the vigilantes down on our heads, but then, I had already bugged this place along with the other bars that vigilantes went to according to Felix. I would have advanced warning.

Then I pause for a second, realising what I’m doing. I’m moving forward with plans I hadn’t even brought to the attention of Adam and Sherrel. I’d done such things many times while in the Chicago Wards, after all, most of the time the PRT and Protectorate would have tried to stop me from doing what needed to be done if they had known what I was about to do, or even actively tried to stop me. I’d never gotten in any significant trouble for it, or at least, anything that actually affected what I was in the Wards to do, restricting my ability to leave the base on anything other than patrols didn’t do much to someone that rarely left the base other than to do my job… and to attend a few dinners being thrown by the mayor. He and some of Chicago’s officials had actually proven useful in making sure I didn’t get much more than a slap on the wrist, as ever since I had been invited to one of their dinners, they had stopped implying that if I continued going off script, they would reconsider my placement in Chicago.

This wasn’t the Wards though, I wasn’t dealing with the PRT and Protectorate anymore. I wasn’t some inconvenient ward that was just politically important enough to let things largely slide, I was now a major part of the new Merchants, and I was going behind the backs of Adam and Sherrel with this. I look to Sherrel, and I see a smile on her face as she sips from her drink. As she notices my attention, she gives a thumbs up. Well, that's one.

With the bugs I had left at the warehouse, I find Adam, he and Felix are watering the plants on the main floor while Mimi has brought lil’ Mark down and is bouncing the giggling babe on her lap. I coalesce my bugs into a sort of orb so that they can speak for me.

“Adam,” my bugs buzz, causing Adam to jump, splashing water about as he turns, one of his hands tucked into his jacket pocket when he turns to my small swarm. Seeing the mass of bugs, he blinks a few times before he relaxes.

“Jesus, you scared the shit outta me, so what you want?” remembering how Sherrel acted when he swore in front of Mark, she likely wouldn’t approve, I’ll have to tell her about it later.

“Sherrel and I have met one of her friends in a bar, a man named Anthony, I was planning on recruiting him to help us get some manpower, he seems decent enough, and wanted to make sure it was fine with you before I did,” Adam’s eyebrows raise as I buzzed at him.

“Anthony? Yeah sure, if he really wants to, I didn’t think we’d be grabbing anyone until we did that raid thing you were talkin’ about. Get some moola ‘n’ shit,” I note the second swear, and have my bugs bob up and down in a pseudo nod before I disperse them back to what they had been doing before. With my permission secured, I continue with Anthony.

“I was a Warlord in life. When no one else would, I took charge and fixed my city, why not do the same here?” I ask him, and his smile grows.

“Well at least you’re honest,” I nod, and slowly stick my hand out, I’m not sure exactly what I am doing, but I can feel something happening to my hand, energy engulfing it. My antennae detecting something I’ve never quite felt before. It was magic, but… different. Softer in a way, somehow, yet, unrestrained. I see a kind of wind, like when I let out a burst of magical energy, pulsing in my hand now, engulfing it, myself, and Anthony in a yellow glow as the lights around the bar dim until everyone except for us, was bathed in shadow. I look Anthony straight in the eyes, and Anthony looks into mine, both of us searching.

“Will you help us?” is all I say. All I can hear is the howl of magical wind, an eerie buzz, and through my antennae, the beat of Anthony’s heart, suddenly pumping as he stares at me. He seems entranced for a moment, before, finally, he seems to shake himself from whatever spell I have accidentally ensnared him in. He looks down at my hand. He swallows hard now, gone is whatever bravado he seemed to have before.

“Fuck, I’m probably going to regret this, but, alright,” he reaches forward, and we shake hands, the energy between us intertwining around us, and the wind suddenly reverses, imploding, before finally everything was back to normal,

And a pact has been made.


	11. Chapter 11

The Skittering Chaos 10

I've edited the previous chapters to have it so that Skidmark's dialogue is less egregious.

Any and all feedback is highly appreciated

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“Want another?” Anthony asks me indicating my empty cup.

“Come on, it’s your first time, drink!” Sherrel calls out, raising her glass, along with some of the other patrons. I smile politely, but my head already feels funny. The room isn’t spinning or anything, but… there is a fuzziness to it that won’t go away no matter how many times I shake my head. It’s weird, and I’m not sure I like it. I can almost feel my eyes go bug-eyed so I’m shutting my eyes really tight to try to deal with it and it seems to work. 

“I guess I could have one more,” I say to them. Anthony nods at me while Sherrel cheers and starts giggling soon after. The sparse crowd that is here at the bar seem like fairly nice people. Not that I have much to go on. But they were generally polite, especially compared to some bars. Through the bugs, I’ve planted in the other bars some of them were really loud and the people there rather rambunctious. In a few of them gunshots had rung out and the whole place had gone to shit. Whenever that would happen I would frown, but there wasn’t much I could do about it at the moment, not with how little of a swarm I had.

Not only that but I didn’t really have a way of telling what was fully going on because I didn’t have as large of a swarm as when I was alive, though I had made sure that I could listen in on the various stalls, and shifted bugs around the various tables when I could. Many of the conversations were rather mundane, or sometimes, steamy. I had gotten a few tips that were actually useful. Like don’t buy the bulky 10-millimetre pistols, they were a bunch of replica garbage base off of some game. Another was to watch out for someone called the “Radio Demon” who was some up and coming big shot in Hell. 

“Well alright then, what’ll ya have? You could have some more of the Rum and pop, you liked that, you could try something harder, like whiskey, if you’re feeling adventurous, or I could get you something lighter,” Anthony states, I frown for a second, trying to think of what I might have. Though, I’m already kind of tipsy judging by the weird feeling in my head.

“Something lighter, I’m already feeling it,” I lazily continue to fly my listening swarms around the bars and clubs we had bugged while driving around. I note the various weapons that people are carrying on them, most of them being small things, though I have felt a few larger weapons sitting beside people. Despite not really needing to since I’m not going into any of the bars tonight, not while I’m tipsy like this. At this point, it’s just a habit to note where all the weapons were and figure out how to avoid them. Right now, don’t go into that bar. Anthony brings me a short glass of some kind of light fizzy drink. I look up at him.

“It’s some peach cider. I get a shipment of the stuff every few days from New Minos. Moth Demons love the stuff, you love the stuff, so I thought I might as well share it with ya,” I nod at him and give my thanks as I accept the glass. I take a sip, it’s nice and sweet, and really smooth. I can still tell that it’s alcoholic, but even straight it tastes exceptional, even better than the sweet rum drink that Anthony gave me before. I continued to fly my bugs around as I continued to drink. Sometimes, I get my bugs to vibrate or do something that lets me focus on them, away from my tipsy mind. 

“-om on Snipes,” I blink as I recognize the name. That had been the name of the vigilante that had been gunning for me specifically. I direct my listening swarm back to their table and note where the bar they are in is. 

“You’ve been drinking yourself under the table ever since we lost him, if you keep at it, you’ll blow all of our money,” slowly, I start to moving my bugs to get a sense of the people around the table. I only had enough to listen in on a single conversation so I begin with the one that had been talking. Positioning the bugs over his clothing and on places where I know, unless someone is paying attention to that particular body part, a person shouldn’t notice. 

The man that had spoken and was discussing the issues of money was a short man who sounded fairly young from his voice. The young man had on a light and loose-fitting tee-shirt along with some shorts to go with it. He honestly seemed fairly human, though I can’t really tell what colour he is due to just using the bug’s sense of touch. Another interesting thing was that the man has a large pair of feathered wings that he has folded up behind him. Holstered on either hip are a pair of boxy guns. Judging by the general shape of them, they had to be some kind of Mac-10 ripoff or something similar. 

“Fuck off Ace, if we neeeed more moneeeeey, we *hic* can just find a dealer or… something…*hic*,” so Arial Ace was a part of the group, Snipe’s group, who had been specifically gunning for me. I couldn’t really tell by the group chat on the phone I had stolen from Brainiache if he was or not before I got banned from it when Snipes had posted that Brainiache’s phone had been stolen. Had I been conscious after escaping Valentino’s territory during the attack, I might have had time to try to contact some of the demons in the chat and get their numbers, but alas, a lost opportunity. 

Shifting my bugs over to the new speaker, I immediately noticed that the speaker, who was obviously Snipes, was hunched over the table, and judging by the complaints, likely had some kind of drink her hand. Like the picture on Brainiache’s phone showed, she was a kind of bird demon who’s wings were more like feathery arms than actual wings, though considering that I could shape shift my wings, it wouldn’t surprise me if she could do the same.

“That’s not the point, the way you’re dealing with this is a problem. I get it, he was my friend, and Rollout’s too, but even if he’s gone, that doesn’t mean that you can just sit there drowning your sorrow away with a bottle of booze,” I shift my bugs to the last person who is with them. The first thing I noticed is that the man who was sitting by them had a kind of exoskeleton over him and that his arms and legs were massive in comparison to the two other vigilantes. Despite the exoskeletoned demon’s massive bulk, the man seemed to be as tall as the other two, meaning he was big but short. He was likely some kind of bug demon judging by the antennae on his head, probably some kind of beetle, as ants weren’t shaped like him… but then again, I was less a moth and more a gray girl who had moth-like features.

I begin to spread my bugs out between all of them, giving me a kind of marionette mental image of them as they moved around. Snipes was chugging the last of her bottle down while Arial Ace had his arms crossed as he watched her. Rollout, who she assumed the rotund one was simply sat there shifting uncomfortably. Considering how Snipes had reacted when Adam and Angel Dust had been taunting her over Brainiache's phone, they were talking about Brainiache.

Angel Dust had said that Valentino had flown into a rage when everything was all over. Considering what he had said that Valentino would have done to us had he caught us in that fight, or even just selling drugs to Angel if Brainiache wasn’t grabbed, he wouldn’t be in a good place. Judging by the tears and the fact that Snipes had been drinking herself to ruin, it didn’t seem that they had picked him up before Valentino flooded the place with his magic smoke. 

“Hey, let's not fight, come on,” the one known as Rollout said, trying to act as the peacemaker. “Snipes, I know you’re angry and upset, and that’s okay,” Rollout reaches over to Snipes and puts a hand on her shoulder, “I’m upset about losing him to, we all are. This wasn’t supposed to be like this, but it happened, and things went to shit. We can’t do anything about it. But what we can do is keep going. You said it yourself, we can’t give up, we need to keep going,” Snipes seemed to still herself as she listened to him.

“Hey, Skitty? You alright? You’ve been quiet for a while now,” I hear Sherrel say and I look up to see Anthony and Sherrel looking at me, concerned.

“I’m listening in on some vigilantes at the moment, one of them was the one that nearly killed me,”

“Lemme’ guess, you want to go give them a little payback, right?” Anthony asks, however, I shake my head.

“No, I’m feeling a bit tipsy, besides, they’re over a dozen blocks away. Instead, I’m going to track them with my bugs and we can take care of them when they think they’re safe. I’m going to tell Adam about our next target,” I say as I gather the bugs I had left back at the warehouse. Once more, I form them into a ball of bugs that I could use to once more tell Adam and Mimi about our latest development. 

“Adam, I found the sniper who shot me. She and some other vigilantes are drinking in one of the bars I bugged, I want to hit them tomorrow when we find out where they are staying,” unlike the first time, Adam doesn’t jump when he suddenly hears the chittering voice coming from the bugs. 

“Already? Damn girl, you work fast.”

“Wait, someone shot you?” I hear Mimi ask from where she’s bouncing the giggling and gurgling Mark.

“I got better,” I reassure Mimi before returning to answering Adam. “Seems they never got their last member back from the attack on Valentino’s. Snipe has apparently been drinking a lot since then. I have other bugs listening in but I haven’t heard anything suspicious yet from the other bars yet,” Adam nods.

“I can see what I can cook up for tomorrow. Say Felix, you said you know how to make guns ‘n’ shit right? Can you make pipe bombs too?” I move a few bugs over to Felix and feel him nodding.

“Good shit. We’ll start getting some of the stuff you might need when we raid those fuckers and show them that the Merchants ain’t someone to fuckin’ mess with,” I can practically feel the manic grin spread across Adam’s face. I wonder if I’m a bad influence on the man. He’s finally gotten his life back together, and now I’m dragging him back down into being a gang member once again.

He’d said that he had felt nothing while he commanded the Merchants, though was this any different. Sure I wanted to make the places we took control of into better and safer places but did that really mean much to Adam? He and the Merchants he controlled while alive had as he was saying, were just surviving, getting by and leaving nothing but destruction in their path. The way that he naturally fell into commanding Felix to begin making bombs for the raid, what we are doing now must not look all that different from the things he had been doing while he was running the Merchants.

Yet, unlike the Brockton Bay Merchants, we weren’t just here to make money from peddling drugs. It was just a means to an end, the same with this raid. We were gathering capital for ourselves so that we could begin to make a push into Pentagram City and start to try to improve things. We just had to make sure not to forget ourselves. This was just like Brockton Bay, and like in Brockton Bay, like in my and the other Undersider’s territories, we had to be the change in the city that would make this place better because no one else would.

Even while I talked with Adam and Sherrel, however, the vigilantes had continued to talk.

“Look, he was your boyfriend, the relationship between you two was more than what we had with him, but we knew him too, and do you really think he would want you to be doing this?” Snipe's head jerked towards him as he said that.

“Fuck you! Don’t fucking use him against me you asshole, and don’t you think I deserve some time to fucking mope? You weren’t the one that got him killed; you weren’t the one that managed to get a bunch of people to join us in Valentino’s territory. I was the one who did that… and… and I was the one that got them all killed or captured or whatever happened to them. It’s, it’s my fault all this shit happened, and I just want to curl up and die.”

“Well at least you know you made a mistake,” a vaguely feminine voice comes from near the table. “Mind if I sit down?” the stranger asks them. They shake their heads and Ariel Ace moves over so that the stranger can sit with them. I use some of my bug to get a sense of the new person. They’re tall and some of my bugs have already brushed up against a long furred tail. The woman is wearing some kind of jeans and a leather jacket to go with it. She’s furred from what I can tell and judging by the cat ears on the top of her head, she’s some kind of feline demon. Having all the information of her I could without my bugs being noticed, I pull them back to relative safety while I listen in.

“Uh, if you don’t mind, who are you?” Ariel Ace asks.

“Someone who’s been doing this longer than three you, and actually knows what is going on around here, unlike most of you new vigilantes it seems,” that agitated Snipes, who points an accusing finger at her, which swayed as she pointed.

“Fuck off, I’m a Ward, I, I know what I’m *hic* doing,” the stranger turns her head to look straight at Snipe, and I can guess that she isn’t exactly impressed. The stranger reaches over a plucks the drink from Snipe's hand, eliciting a sharp “Hey!” from Snipes who scrambles to get it back, but the stranger is too quick for her.

“And I was a Ward that graduated into the Protectorate, and I’ve been here for two years already being a vigilante, while most of you got here at some point in the last week or so, isn’t that right?” the veteran vigilante turns her head to look at all of them again. They all nod along as she looks at them.

“So you don’t have any idea what is going on down here and this is pretty much all new to you,” the feline demon sighs. “I guess you can’t be blamed for not knowing the first rule in Hell, do not to fuck with the Overlords, especially as new as you guys seem to be,” the other three vigilantes nod their head, likely remembering back to their assault on Valentino’s and their attempt to kill me. 

“What were you even trying to do there anyway?” The hero asks.

“We were gonna *hic* go kill the bitch that started mastering everyone at the end of the world,” I frown slightly at that. It wasn’t as if there was any other choice. No one would work together, and we would have all died otherwise. It had not been my first choice, but no one would listen or even try to put aside their differences and come together. If it were up to me I would have gladly not subjected myself to Panacea and Bonesaw and thus gotten killed at the end to stop whatever chain reaction they had started when they opened up the connection allowing me to start mastering people. 

“So you attacked one of the demon triumvirate’s territories so that you could kill a single villain?” it was at this moment that Rollout decided to jump into the conversation. 

“Well not everyone. Some of us were there to try to take down this master, other people in the group chat, well, actually, a bunch of them joined to attack the overlord and take him down since there were a couple of teams that were going to come back us up when we went after her. Some were there to take down the overlords businesses and weaken him in general, and there were a few that just wanted to fight.” 

“Most of *hic* the guys I got to join were already itching for a fight, ‘n’ Brainiache told me that they were Valentino’s territory, so *hic* I said that they could get a good fight in with the Valentino gang while we tried to take out Weaver. We’d help them getaway, and we’d *hic* hit the overlord there. Then more people wanted to come just to help fight one of the gangs… and then some wanted to actually fight the gang leader as well and take him down for good. Things kind of just spiralled from there,” 

“I guess it didn’t cross your mind how he was able to stay as a demon overlord for decades?” the feline former hero asks, and judging by her tone, she wasn’t particularly impressed with the vigilante trio. 

“No not really, but we weren’t going to really planning on fighting him much, at least, not until everyone started piling on to fight him. We were just after that one villain that was mind-controlling people like Brainiache at the end of the world,” Ariel Ace told the hero. The hero nodded along. 

“Alright… I guess it wasn’t the worst attempt at taking down an overlord; there are a few nut jobs and idiots around here that try it every year. You guys shouldn’t be one of those nut jobs just so you know. Nothing good happens to those guys,” the feline lifts Snipe’s drink and starts to drink it down, causing Snipe to literally squawk at her. 

“That’s my drink!” 

“And you’re underage, or did you graduate from the Wards?” the veteran vigilante asks as she finishes the drink off, causing Snipe to sputter indignantly. 

“It isn’t like we are trying to be like those ‘nutjobs’,” Rollout complains.

“I get that now, I wasn’t so sure when I saw it going on in the news. What you guys need is someone to show you the ropes, help you realise who you do and do not fuck with. I can help you with that, I’ve been here two years already and I’ve seen a lot of shit, plus, you guys can show me that vigilante group chat thing you were talking about. It’s the first time I’ve heard of it,” the hero says. The others in the group start nodding as well. 

“Hey Skitty, what’s going on?” I hear Sherrel ask beside me.

“It sounds like they know less than me when it comes to Hell,” I say simply while continuing to listen to the conversation. “I’ll tell you on the way back,” I go to take another sip and realise my cup is empty. I’d been sipping at it while I listened in on the vigilantes. My head doesn’t feel significantly different, but then, I’m still feeling a bit dizzy… better safe than sorry.

“Yeah sure, that sounds great,”

“Hey wait a second, *hic* I’m supposed to be the leader, we voted!” Snipe cried out. Fragmentation among the ranks then? The team from the sounds of it is fairly new, and already someone from outside was trying to move in on the leadership.

“Now hold on, I didn’t say I was going to be your new leader,” the hero declared. “I just want to show you guys the ropes. I get that you guys probably want to stay independent, I get that, I do too, but I wouldn’t mind having some allies so that we can back each other up when the big guys start making some moves. You’ve riled one of the demonic triumvirate up from what I’ve heard, and when one of them gets riled up, the others get riled up as well,” even so, assuming mentor ship over them might cause dissension between them as they look at the more experienced hero’s work. Despite what the former hero is saying, mentor ship is still assuming leadership over the group. The Wards technically were being led by Tecton, and myself when we in tactical situations, but we were ultimately under the command of those who were supposed to be our mentors, and their orders overrode our own when it came to the chain of command. Luckily, it didn't happen to us very often, but I've heard during the few times I actually bothered to go to the meet ups to meet with other Protectorate heroes of the problems mentors could cause to the chain of command. Often times when that happened, things devolved into Wards politics, and who was the mentor of who.

“I guess…” Snipes says finally as she twiddles her thumbs.

“Good, I’ve got a bit of time on my hands now, what with Valentino looking for trouble now. Just give me your address and I’ll see you tomorrow morning and I can get you properly informed about what you just fell into,” useful… Ariel Ace tells the hero their address, though since I don’t know the city that well I relay it to Anthony and Sherrel.

“32[sup]nd[/sup] red walk road? I think that’s an apartment building. Whole place is residential. Other than that, I don’t know. Not a good part of town, but it ain’t bad either. No overlord there either so they likely won’t care,” Anthony states. I nod and listen back in on the vigilantes. The hero is getting up to leave now, though she turns back to them before she leaves.

“Oh, and I’m Battery by the way. From the Protectorate ENE,” Battery. I remember her back in Brockton. Bonesaw had killed her while we were all under the influence of her mind plague, and she’d been the one that had confronted me when I took my territory back in Brockton. How would she react to finding I was doing the same thing here? Would she fight me, like she had wanted to back in Brockton Bay? Likely, even if it was just to settle the score. The PRT and Protectorate had been rather hostile to us back then despite the good work we were doing. While it’s possible that she has had a change of heart ever since her death, I can’t count on it, especially if she blames me for her death. Assault certainly did. Though, I can track her, and use my bugs to talk to her. I’ll have to do it before the other vigilantes tell her about me. Snipe knows that I was Weaver, and Battery knows me as Skitter. She’ll likely make the connection. Though with Snipe there to poison the well, I likely won’t be able to try to convince her otherwise of my good intentions, not after Colin had spilled to them that I had tried to be a hero first. With how she talked about “my kind” always having an agenda, she might make assumptions.

I leave my bugs on her. While listening in on the bar would prove useful, it was more useful to… Despite not really paying attention to the eyesight of my bugs, mostly because it was a confusing mess, there is a flash of light, and suddenly the bugs are gone. I fly a few bugs out, but can’t find the feline hero. I wonder what happened?

No matter, I can still track the vigilantes in the bar back to their place.

“I think we should get back to the warehouse, we need to plan our attack.”

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I look over my gun one more time as we begin to near the apartments that the vigilantes were still in. They were just getting up and were moving around sluggishly inside of their apartment. Snipes was cooking eggs in the kitchen, Rollout was waiting patiently while Ariel Ace was in the main room of the apartment.

With some of the extra bugs, we gathered on the way here I scouted out the surrounding buildings for people. Mostly tenants, and while there were a few feline demons around, none of them were wearing a leather jacket like Battery had been last night. While it wasn’t much to go on, it would have to do as I mark each of the felines around the area. Better safe than sorry.

Satisfied once more with my gun, I load the magazine back into it as we are coming to a stop. At the same time, I shift my wings from a nice and comfortable long fur coat to my old Skitter costume uniform, while I shift my antennae into the mask. I've been trying to figure out how to make my mask with the silk I can spit, but trying to sort though it is a pain. I'll likely need a loom or something before I'm able to begin to properly weave my costume again, or I need to find many many more spiders.

“Alright, here’s your stop. Make sure to tell us if you need Skiddy to blast the apartment,” Sherrel says.

“Don’t be shy, any problem at all, you just tell me and I’ll get blasting,” Adam comments from his seat in the turret where he was looking through the viewport of the tank turret that had been welded on top of the van. I pat the seat that Adam is on.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll get a chance to blast someone very soon,” I comment before stepping out the back door of the van. At the same time, I bring together some bugs to act as a quick way to tell Adam and Sherrel if anything was wrong. Sherrel had parked on the opposite side of the road, just far enough that the turret could fire on the apartment or anything that came out of the main building's entrance. None of the vigilantes are paying attention to the windows of the apartment and the blinds were drawn so they wouldn’t even be able to catch a glimpse. The back of the building leads into a dense section of alleyways with a pack of animals of some kind back there seeming to be patrolling their territory.

There are a few people walking around on the streets already, either heading to cars on the sides of the road or just walking down the sidewalk. Had I still had my old power I could have used my bugs to keep them out of the way, but I’ve only got a large enough swarm to create something of a mental map of the building I’m going into, and to track the people inside of the building. If everything goes to plan, however, this fight shouldn’t leave the apartment let alone the building.

The entrance of the building is sparsely populated, and the red-skinned demon manning the lobby counter doesn’t even look up from his magazine as I enter the building and walk past his desk. I, like him, do my best to ignore him and the audible sound of too much lotion on a specific body part. I think I saw Angel Dust on the cover too.

Before I head to the stairs, I reach the back door and start laying down some layers of barriers to prevent escape through the back into the alleyway. Adam, Angel and I had been able to escape out the back of a building, why couldn’t they? Soon enough, there is a visibly glowing blue barrier with its acceleration heading back into the building. With the back alley being patrolled by territorial animals, there shouldn’t be anyone trying to come in.

Turning from the back door, I walk back over to the main lobby, once more ignore the disgusting act at the front desk, and ascend the stairs to the vigilante’s apartment. The apartment itself is on the third floor and as far as I can tell from my bugs marking the different members of Snipe’s vigilante group, they hadn’t really moved much. Pulling out my pistol from a pocket on my wings turned villain costume, I manoeuvre the bugs in the room onto them, a bug for each body part and each joint, giving me a good idea of what they are doing inside. I take aim at the door as I prepare to fire through it at Ariel Ace’s head.

I fire a bullet through the door, the thin wood door doing nothing to stop my magically accelerated bullet. With the additional effects that I put onto the fields within the barrel, it accelerated the bullet much faster than it had any right to be while also muffling the bang of its acceleration, meaning I essentially had an effectively suppressed pistol without having to go about buying a silencer for it. I felt the light that was my bug on Ariel Ace’s head disappear and felt him slump over. Not wasting time, I used the bugs I had on the inside to unlock the door.

The other two are confused about the sound, though Snipes seems to realise what it is as she pushes herself away from the stove and heads for her weapon on the kitchen table. She's the least likely to be a threat, what with having been a tinker/thinker combo when she'd been alive. Once they all awoke from their "nap," she can be the one that tells them why it's a bad idea to come after us. As I take a few steps into the apartment and aim at where I can feel the bugs on her legs are. I fire two shots and I can feel with my bugs as she crumples to the ground at the same time the bugs I had on her knees vanish from my senses. I hear a shout of fear from the kitchen, and a scream of pain.

Just like I did with Ariel Ace, I aim at Rollout’s head through the wall and fire. I feel the bug on his head die, yet, he doesn’t fall down. Instead, I feel his arms fly to his face and a shout of pain coming from the kitchen as he nearly gets thrown over and almost falls down. I land a bug on the back of his head this time and fire again. His head flies back and he falls down, his back to the wall of the kitchen. Rather than staying down, he pushes himself forward towards the fridge, and presses his back against it. His armour must be tough, or he's a much more powerful brute than I thought. I fire a few more times, penetrating the wall and the fridge, but unlike when I was just firing through the wall; he doesn’t seem that affected by my bullets. His hands are on his head after the first shot through the fridge and barely seems to faze him. The only sign of damage I can feel with my bugs is that he seems to be bleeding badly from his head. I move a few bugs onto him from Snipes onto his head, and feel that his head armour is completely cracked and slit open on the spots where I managed to shoot. 

I don’t have enough ammo to keep plinking at him through the fridge so I begin to walk through the main room to the doorway into the kitchen. As I pass the couch, I see Ariel Ace slumped over the remains of the cheap coffee table, his weight apparently being enough to cause it to give out. I fire another shot into his head to make sure he’s dead. You can never be too careful.

I make my steps to the kitchen slow and deliberate, making sure that Rollout and Snipe can hear me as I walk towards them. It wouldn’t be enough to just kill them. They would be up before long and will have learned nothing, especially since they likely didn’t even know it was me who had so easily defeated them. We had a plan to keep them down for a while, though I was going to add onto it. For Ariel Ace, he wouldn’t know what hit him, but the other two would know who killed them, and being so easily destroyed would harm their morale, and make them think twice before coming after me, and subsequently the Merchants, again.

As I stand near the doorway, I finger one of the pipe bombs that Felix had made. I consider using it against Rollout, it would minimize the danger to me if either of them turned out to be blasters, though the way that Snipe had been trying to crawl to the table before I got close to the doorway, and how Rollout was cowering, it wasn’t likely. I take another deliberate step, and the bug on Snipe’s head swivelled, showing her looking towards the doorway. Good.

I step through the doorway, my gun already up. I can see Snipe’s eye widen as she sees my masked face, showing her the mask of the person she had just down her scope less than a week ago. I see Rollout tense up to try to tackle me, and I adjust my aim slightly to aim at his less armoured knee. I fire once and his tackle dies there as he falls to his side, a pained shout escaping his lips.

“Rollout!” Snipe shouts out, I watch her with my bugs, but she’s frozen and no longer trying to get to her gun on the table. I adjust my aim for his head now that he’s incapacitated.

There is a surge of magical energy inside of him and suddenly he’s growing much larger. I fire my gun at him but all it does is throw his head back and create another divot in the exoskeleton armour on his head. At the same time, I sense with my antennae how he’s doing it. I’ll have to try that for myself later to see if it works, or even see if I could reverse it to make myself smaller and less of a target. Though it seems he’s pouring magic into his body, different than how Angel did to bring out or pull in his extra limbs.

“Grahh!” Rollout shout and he flings himself my way and I skip back while I hit the button to drop my magazine from the handle. I’d run out of bullets, I’d been hoping that I could deal with the beetle-like demon with my last few bullets, but no such luck. He stumbles to his feet and he is significantly bigger. He must have been a Changer in life. He tries to swing at me but I send a blast of magical energy his way, throwing him off balance, causing him to stumble backwards, though not over.

I slot a new magazine into my pistol and begin firing again, though this time he hides his head behind his arms. They’re covered in even thicker exoskeleton armour now and while they do penetrate his arms, sending small amounts of blue blood out with the impacts, he doesn’t seem phased at all. He charges me and I step back out the kitchen, letting him hit the wall. I raise my gun again into his head, only this time when I hit it, it doesn’t fling his head back, but rather more like someone had punched him.

I send a blast his way once more but rather than pushing him off balance he just takes it before he seems to dive at me. I jump out of the way of him but he keeps going, seeming to curl up into a ball and rolls. Rather than stopping his roll it keeps going, only getting faster, then, it climbs up the wall a bit. Rather than fire, I begin to put down some acceleration fields, I can guess that he’s going to come back around. His spin rolls around and comes back for me as I expected and I hop through my acceleration field in time for him to impact heavily with the wall, sending dust and debris around. I stare incredulously for a moment as he has gone through the wall and the cabinets.

So much for reducing collateral damage. With my lower arms, I grab one of the pipe bombs and get ready to prime it. The things were made with a fairly short fuse so that Adam could use them in his modified baseball cannon. With the way that the magic that Rollout was using I didn’t even need my bugs on him to know where exactly he was, though, whatever magic he was using was turning him into some kind of unstoppable object because I can feel him spin around the kitchen and go right through a chair as he continued to speed up. Once more I begin to lay down acceleration fields to let me dodge with as he comes in for a second pass. I prime the pipe bomb and jump out of the way using the acceleration field, speeding me along to the kitchen entrance again. He comes through the wall again, only slowing down a bit as he comes for where I had just been a moment ago. I duck into the kitchen again as the pipe bomb explodes knocking him off balance and sending him spinning end over end to the side.

I hear a grunt from him through the bugs I have on him, but he isn’t dead, not yet. Stepping out of the kitchen again, I begin to unload my magazine at his head. The first three shots connect, and I can even see a small splatter of blood before his arm raises again. It absorbs a few more shots, cracking his arm armour more. Switching tactics I aim for his knees as I had before.

He starts charging again, this time however for the wall instead of me. I fire a few shots, hitting his carapace knee, and it causes him to stumble but he keeps going regardless of the number of shots I put into him. I step back into the kitchen to see him come through the wall for the third time, and I shoot his knee once more. This time his knee gives out from under him and he stumbles to his other knee. Though he reaches forwards… and grabs Snipe. I try to fire again but instead of another shot, I hear a distinctive click. Once more I hit the release for the magazine while my other set of hands grabs my other pipe bomb and chucks it at them. I step out of the kitchen once again and load my magazine back into my gun, sensing him with my antennae and bugs. He notices the bomb and seems to make another dive, Snipes in his arms as he rolls up, holding her tight and rolls toward the doorway I’m aiming at. Then, he bounces.

The bomb detonates, and the duo rides the explosion. Rather than hitting the wall, however, they smash right through the window, glass flying everywhere as they exit the building.

“They’ve left through the window,” I announce to Adam and Sherrel from my bugs in the van.

“Yeah, I fucking see them. Damn that mother fucker’s fast!” Adam comments. I step just close enough to the window to look out of it as Rollout rolls out onto the nearly empty road. People are staring and looking in the direction of the window as well as the escaping rolling beetle bug. Rollout continues to get faster as he continues to roll. This was likely where he excelled in his combat style, out in the open where he could build up speed and ram into people. It’s barely a few seconds more, as Rollout gets near the end of the street and is likely about to turn when I hear the boom of the van’s cannon. The road near Rollout explodes and the both of them are sent flying, Rollout flies out onto the street, while Snipe is sent even further, rolling onto the sidewalk, where she lies motionless. I can’t see anything from where I am but I can feel that Adam is reloading the cannon as fast as he can. I can still sense Rollout trying to move with some new bugs on him. The turret readjusts, and just as Rollout finally stands up, Adam fires and splatters the bug across the road.

“Hell yeah! Did you see that! Fucker went splat!” Adam shouted from the turret while Sherrel giggles at her boyfriend's enthusiasm. As I look at the damage to the road and frown slightly. The vigilantes that had come after me had been defeated, but it wasn’t a total victory. Not the worst outcome and the crater from the tank shot didn’t look any worse than a particularly bad pothole.

Turning from the scene, I move into the kitchen. There are small fires from the pipe bomb I threw, only just starting up. I move to the sink, which was luckily still intact, and pulled the detachable nozzle from its place so that I could spray down the small fires. It wouldn’t do for any of the loot that these vigilantes had to go up in flames.

While I’m spraying down the fires though, I feel one of the felines I had marked while they were entering the area, begin to sprint towards the scene. Lightning surrounded her and my bugs were destroyed in an instant as she sped up significantly before my bugs died. Damn it, I’d hoped that Battery wouldn’t show up until after we disposed of the bodies and grabbed the loot.

“Heads up, Battery’s in the area, coming fast from the left street ahead of you,” the tank turret turns to look in the direction that Battery is coming from, but Adam reacts too late as Battery speeds past the corner, and picking up Snipe. With my bugs, I can hear her scream out as lighting courses through her before it turns into something further away as my bugs are incinerated by the lighting cat demon. Adam tries to adjust the turret to hit her, but she speeds off back around the corner she had just appeared from.

“Shit! Don’t let her get away!” I hear Adam shout and suddenly Sherrel is taking the van out of park.

“You handle Battery, I’ll get the loot,” I tell them with my swarm. With whatever she is using to become a speedster is also keeping me from being able to track her properly. If Adam and Sherrel can catch up to them, we could take out a veteran vigilante, it was already too late to consider an alliance now. If she got away we would-be enemies, as Snipe tells her about me, but even if she didn’t escape, or we somehow got Snipe away from her, she’d be able to tell who we are by the van, and I don’t know that an alliance with Battery is worth throwing away Sherrel’s van. Though, considering Battery’s head start, and how fast she is moving, unless she ran out of juice after rounding the corner, she could easily escape into the alleyways. Even so, I move my bugs to where Battery had last been, keeping them at around torso level so that I can better track her. Then, suddenly Battery breaks down an alleyway like I had thought she would.

“She went down the third alleyway coming up on your left. Get the turret ready, you’ve only got one shot,” I tell them. As the van approaches the third alleyway, Sherrel brings the vehicle to a squealing stop, lining up the turret to the alleyway. Adam fires, but swears loudly as I presume he misses. I have no more bugs in that alleyway and with how she was going; I doubt the bugs I have would be able to catch up with her now.

I frown over failing to take down Snipe and Battery. That was another enemy we will have to deal with, and this time, I doubt she will be so easy to track her in the future. In the end, though, it wasn’t a total loss, and truth be told, while taking out these vigilantes before Battery arrived was one of the objectives, it wasn’t the main one. It didn’t even guarantee the assistance of Battery, but rather just the opportunity to talk with her. Stepping away from the sink, I pull open the fridge and grab a milk jug from it to pour onto the fire in the main room. It’s only just starting, but carpet fires were a serious danger. With that done, I move into one of the bedrooms, the one where I knew they were keeping all of their money and loot.

Alec, if you’re still alive, I’m coming.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

I’m curious how people feel about getting a closer look at the vigilantes that helped instigate the attack on Taylor, and how the combat scene feels. Not a 100% success but it certainly went well enough in my opinion, especially with one of the members using the power of friendship *cough cough demonic form cough cough* to nearly let some of them escape before getting smeared across the concrete.

Oh, and Snipe died in the arms of Battery, getting electrocuted to death while getting sped away. Just thought you should know.

I'll also be continuing to polish this for a bit since I wasn't able to give it the proofreading it deserves before I got it out for my self-appointed deadline.


End file.
